


Chronicle

by eveninglottie



Category: Mass Effect, Mass Effect - All Media Types, Mass Effect: Andromeda
Genre: Angst, Anxious Ryder, Eventual Smut, F/M, Friends to Lovers, Slow Burn, So much angst, The slowest
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-03-28
Updated: 2017-05-17
Packaged: 2018-10-12 00:07:13
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 14
Words: 54,007
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10477635
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/eveninglottie/pseuds/eveninglottie
Summary: Tell me, sister, how do you wish upon a star when all the stars go out?*on permanent hiatus*





	1. Forget Me Not

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **"I am your labyrinth."**
> 
> "Ariadne's Lament" by Friedrich Nietzsche
> 
> ~ ✧ ~

The breeze coming off Lake Superior stirred the long grass around Saskia’s bare feet, fingers drifting aimlessly along the feathered tops, as she wandered up and over the lip of the hill. She hummed absently to herself and breathed in the setting sun. Content. Calm. 

Her jacket and boots had been left on the hood of her truck, the decrepit yellow pick-up that had been collecting dust in the garage of her family’s long-ago home. She’d half-expected to need to walk the few miles down the ambling dirt road to the lake. But the key she had left in the christmas cookie jar by the fridge was still there, and the old engine sputtered to life, the same glorious rumble and cough she’d come to love after working on it for nearly a year, back when she was still in recovery. It might just have been the most beautiful sound she’d ever heard. It still was. 

It had been almost five years since she had moved away, but she still felt like a teenager wandering slowly through the wildflowers and brush. When she’d had the energy, and her brother hadn’t forced her to stay in bed, she’d spent all her time out here. The old path was familiar, still threaded across the ground despite years and years of neglect, after so much time spent far, far away.

That golden light calling her to a home that never was, but might have been.

Saskia tucked a lock of wispy silver hair behind her ear as a gust blew off the lake, and frowned. She turned back to the road. No sign of another car, or maybe it was a motorcycle again, after Lukas had crashed the first. _Idiot probably forgot what time we were supposed to meet._

Sighing, she came back to the field and the sunset and the storm-grey water, staring over the little cliff that overlooked Lake Superior. Orange butterfly-weed and pink prairie rose sprouted up amidst the endless, swaying yellow-green sedge and barley, but she kept her eyes peeled for blue.

Birds drifted overhead, calling out the passing of the day as the sun dipped below the horizon. The smell of fresh pine and pollen clung to the air, cut with the iron-tang of the lake. Wherever she went, however far she traveled, she could recall the smell, so branded to her consciousness was this place, bittersweet and just a bit cold. 

She wondered if that would stay true when she left, but 2.5 million light-years was a long way to remember the smell of Lake Superior. Part of her didn’t want to remember. Wanted a fresh start under the light of a new sun. Or suns. Golden worlds in a golden galaxy—what would they taste like, smell like, look like? Would any of it be familiar?

_There_ , she thought, a smile tugging at her lips.  _Myosotis scorpioides. Just where I left you._

Sprouting up from the bottom of a dead tree, pushing through rotted bark and tangled grass, were a few specks of faded blue.

She hesitated as she pulled some from the ground, wondering if she shouldn’t just take them all. It’s not like she would be coming back.

The flowers swayed, but she didn’t know if it was in longing or farewell. Maybe both. 

She sighed, and rose. Something should stay behind when she was gone.

She left three flowers, a bundle of forget-me-nots in her hand, and turned back to the lake. Her chest constricted as she approached the edge of the cliff, the same fear clinging to her heart that she always felt when she came back—that what she sought might not be there. She knew her father visited every now and then, and he’d never mentioned the possibility of it being lost in a storm or a rockslide, but still…

A rounded tombstone stood in a soft red halo as the sun reflected off the lake.

Her feet slowed as she approached. The flowers bent slightly in her grip and she took a shaky breath. She ran her thumb across the polished granite.

“Hey, Mom.”

Her knees folded underneath her, and she sat, taking care not to crush the mass of flowers still grouped at the base of the tombstone since her last visit.

“I’m surprised you’ve still got so many of these,” she said, thumbing one of the petals and grinning. “Dad comes and replants these every year, right?”

Readying herself, she flexed her hand and let a little dark energy play around the stems. They shone brighter, dancing with blue light that hummed over her skin. She threaded them over the flowers in the ground, saturating the earth with a bit of her biotics. The stalks morphed into one another, forming one large plant that pulsed with light.

Her fingers shook as her temple throbbed, and the pain came, as she had known it would. She fought the urge to clench her hands, knowing it was just a trick of her mind.

It was always harder to use her biotics before getting a new implant. But she’d gone through so many at this point, she was used to it. One of the many gifts she’d been left with after that horrible accident five years ago. And since she never used her biotics for anything else, she could spare a bit of pain.

“I know,” Saskia murmured, “you think this is silly. But some of us actually like flowers.”

She leaned up to brush a bit of water residue from her mother's name, tracing the letters _Ellen Lee Ryder_.

“I meant to come back sooner, but the last year has been insane. Our handlers have been forcing us to do combat training. Most of the time I feel like a bruised peach.” She grimaced. “I am a terrible shot. Lukas is pretty good, though, so some of Dad’s genes passed on. He hasn’t quite figured out that stony silence, but he might mellow out in his old age. Don’t tell him I said that, though. It’s already hard enough for his head to remain balanced with all the extra weight of his ego.”

Falling back to the ground, she leaned back on her elbows, closing her eyes as the setting sun brushed against her pale skin.

“Your son, by the way,” she added, opening an eye to share a knowing look with the tombstone, “is late. I told him to show up at four. It is now five fifteen. I think.” Peering down at her omni-tool, she nodded. “Five fourteen.”

It made no sense, but she’d missed the real sun. She’d spent so much time on Helios Station the past eight months, all that artificial and filtered light had made her crave the real thing. 

Especially since she was about to leave it for good. She didn’t know what kind of suns she’d find in Andromeda. It made an ironic kind of sense that she started to develop nostalgia for Earth  _now_ , after most of her life spent in indifference or desperate yearning to leave the confines of her then-prison. 

“Obviously we have no idea what we’re going to see once we get there,” she continued, conversing idly with the air, as she always did when she came back, “but I have a feeling that I will be in the second wave of the Pathfinder team. Send in the nerds after Lukas and Dad clear any crazy wildlife out. I was actually looking at your research the other day. I still don’t understand how you managed to figure out the neural interface with the L2’s. We’re trying to retrofit a few just in case our L5’s don’t hold up through darkspace. It’s just the lack of any actual gravitational force out there that’s going to make it hard for those of us who rely on them, and people are worried. But you know all about the wonders of biotics in darkspace, obviously.”

She rambled for a while, saying whatever came to mind about finishing up her degree at Columbia and taking a few months to work on Eden Prime after the Geth attack, joining up with an Alliance peace-keeping force to unearth a new Prothean site on the edge of turian space. Everything she’d done since her last visit over a year ago. After a while, she lapsed into silence, breathing in the air and trying to recreate the shape of her mother’s face in her mind.

Even at the end, she’d been gorgeous. Brown hair streaked with a similar shade of faux silver, skin almost translucent, from the same disease that Saskia had managed to survive, though not without her own small casualties. Laugh lines gathered around her mouth, and warm, deep brown eyes that had retained their pigment even until the last. Eyes that Saskia no longer shared.

The roar of a motorcycle broke through her attempt to remember the exact color, cutting off with a growl as it parked behind her.

Saskia sat up and peered over her shoulder as a lanky figure hopped off the bike, dropping his helmet and shaking out his shaggy silver hair.

“You started without me?” he called in mocked outrage.

She sighed and turned back to the tombstone. “I understand you didn’t really have a choice in the matter, but couldn’t you have just left him in the med-bay or something, given him to a nice colonial family?”

Lukas sprawled onto the ground next to her, banging into her bare feet and nearly knocking her over.

“I want you both to know that I am late because of reasons that were beyond my control.” He tugged on her earlobe before pulling off his gloves, their own private greeting and reassurance.

She turned to grin at him. “You went out for drinks with Dan and Marlowe, right?”

Lukas shot her a suspicious look, letting her smooth back his hair where it stuck up in the front from his helmet. “You put a tracker on me?”

“Marlowe called me last night.”

Her brother’s face tightened in mock disapproval. “Seriously? Could you not seduce my childhood friends before we take our glorious departure from the galaxy?”

She blushed and shoved him away. “Jesus, I didn’t—” She broke off as he waggled his eyebrows. “You’re horrible.”

“Your daughter is still a spinster, Mom.” He grinned at the tombstone. “You’d be glad to know that I have fulfilled my brotherly duties well the past,” he paused to count on his fingers, “twenty-one years.”

Saskia frowned. “I am not a spinster.”

“You knit.”

“Sometimes. Lots of people knit.”

“Do those people also lock themselves into their apartments for two weeks to figure out how to program a machine to knit for them? You’re right. Not a spinster. A spinster _master_. An über spinster.”

“I spend my time the way I want, thank you. At least I didn’t almost get locked into a marriage contract with a Salarian banker on my first night back from Alliance training because I was _bored_.”

Lukas wrinkled his nose and stretched out on the ground. “You’re just jealous I’m in a position to almost get locked into a marriage contract with a Salarian banker.”

“I was not jealous when Dad had to bail you out of CSEC for trashing a Kodiak shuttle in your getaway.”

He just stuck out his tongue at her, and she almost smiled.

The past few months they’d been spending all of their time together, just like they used to, before she recovered and he left for Alliance training. Even if they were older and their interests had diverged, she was never more at peace than when he was at her side, making stupid jokes and generally being a pain in her ass. Looking after her in his own annoying, determined way. 

While it had, at one time, been easy to spot the similarities between them, it was getting harder. Where Lukas’ skin was a flushed, freckled beige, hers was pale, practically translucent no matter how much sun she got. His eyes were a deep hazel-green, like their father, and hers were something closer to dark grey with a ring of silver around each iris. She was small, a bit too soft, though not as much as she used to be, thanks to the extensive Initiative training, where he was normal-sized and fit.

The only thing that matched now was their hair, and that was only because of Lukas’ stubborn determination to stick to a decision he’d made when he was sixteen.

“How was your lunch?” she asked, picking off a leaf from his shoulder and letting it drift into the wind over the lake.

Lukas shrugged, some of his good humor fading. “Fine, I guess. They both think I’m crazy. So, that’s fun.”

He had kept in contact with almost everyone he’d ever known his entire life, including the friends he’d made during their brief stay in Minnesota while Saskia was bedridden with the disease that had eventually killed their mother. She’d made the mistake once of checking the social feed on his extranet terminal, only to find that it scrolled so fast she couldn’t even read the names. He was giving up a lot to leave with the Andromeda Initiative, she knew that. It might be the chance of humanity’s lifetime, but for someone like him, it would be like closing the door on a crowded room of people that loved him.

Not so much for her. She might not be a spinster, exactly, but her list of people to say goodbye to had been rather small. And even then, the only one she would truly miss had died five years ago.

“You sure you don’t want to spend tonight with them?” she asked, knowing she wasn’t explosively entertaining company. If he wanted to leave the Milky Way with a bang, she wasn’t going to be shooting off fireworks.

He gave her a disparaging frown and nudged her foot with his boot. “Don’t be stupid. We’re staying at the house tonight and leaving first thing in the morning. Even I’m not so dumb as to get trashed with those assholes the night before we ship out.”

Saskia couldn’t help the small smile that spread across her lips. Her brother might be a ridiculous idiot, but he was _her_ ridiculous idiot.

And she didn’t want to spend her last night on Earth with anyone else.

She winced as a spike of mild pain shot through her right temple, an after-echo of using her biotics for the flowers.

Lukas frowned and propped himself up. “Your amp still bothering you?”

“Yeah, but it’s okay. Harry said he was going to replace it as soon as he got the new ones.”

The Initiative was apparently sending state of the art biotic amps for everyone involved in the mission. It was the only reason he’d approved her at all. The new L5x amps were supposed to dampen biotics and make it easier for those with unstable abilities to function in high-stress environments. While her L4s had been enough for her day-to-day life, Harry had made sure the L5x would be ready for implementation before signing off on her. She might have recovered, but the shadow of the disease still hovered over her. 

“It’s fine,” she insisted, jabbing her finger into Lukas’ bare strip of stomach where his flashy red motorcycle jacket had ridden up.

He hummed and pursed his lips, clearly not believing her. “You get the dye?”

She nodded, eyeing the dark roots on his scalp. “You sure you want to keep doing it?”

He’d been bleaching and dyeing his hair for nearly five years. Ever since she and her mother had begun to lose the pigment in their hair due to the disease they’d both contracted after an accident with unrefined element zero, Lukas had been dyeing his in solidarity. When their mother had died and Saskia had recovered, he’d kept up the practice—a silent nod to what she had gone through, to what they’d lost. Plus, as he so frequently liked to tell her, it would be too weird if her hair was a different color than his.

“Yeah, of course,” he said incredulously. “And thank you, wonderful, glorious, angelic sister of mine.”

“No, keep going,” she deadpanned when he finished. “You know how much I like it when you wax poetic. And I’ll help. Obviously.”

“Good, because I’m shit at it.”

She nodded in agreement. “You really are. It came out blue last time, right?”

“And I still have no idea why,” he said with a dramatic sigh, tucking his arm under hers as she lay down again.

They stared up at the darkening sky for a few minutes, both of them silent. Saskia watched the little puffs of cloud drift over them, trying to memorize their shapes. Would there be clouds in Andromeda?

_Obviously_ , she thought with a frown, they were just moisture collected in the atmosphere. _I’m going mad with sentimentality._

“We should have saved some of her,” Lukas muttered. “To take with us.”

“No,” she looked at him, “she wouldn’t have wanted to leave.”

He breathed out and closed his eyes. “I know. I just… I don’t want to think about her staying here alone.”

Saskia looked back up at the sky, knowing exactly what he meant. They’d scattered her ashes across the ground here, in the spot she’d taken to love in her last months.

Though, Saskia had always had a sneaking suspicion that her father had kept a little of their mother to release into space.

_One foot on the ground and one in the stars_ , he used to say, staring at her mother with bright eyes and the beginnings of a smile. He was never more alive than when he'd stared at her, never more in love. Saskia didn't like to think that that was why she'd been so eager to join him in the Initiative, but that brightness had been there when he'd asked. Had called to that small part of her that had never really grown out of wanting to see it in his eyes. 

“Yeah,” she said after a while. “You want some time alone?”

Lukas' hand closed around hers, pulling her closer. “Nope. I wouldn’t know what to say.”

“You don’t have to say anything—”

“Leave it, Saskia. Please.”

His small, tight voice was enough to tell her that it would be too much for him.

Lukas had always burned brighter than her, felt a little more acutely, more wildly. He was the one who cried at funerals and shouted at police officers and got drunk and ran off with Salarian bankers. He laughed a little louder and smiled a bit wider. The brilliant sunrise to her lingering light of dusk. 

It had always been harder for him to lose their mother so young. And he had never learned to hide it like she had. 

“Okay,” she said, reaching over with her free hand to tug gently at his earlobe. “Let me know when you want to leave.”

Lukas turned to her with a small, sad smile. Nudged her with his forehead. “We can stay until the sun sets.”

She nodded and turned back to the sky.

As it always did when she let herself think about tomorrow, _really_  think about it, she buzzed with anticipation. They were finally leaving. After nearly a year of planning and testing and jumping over hurdles, they were about to set off for the edge of the galaxy. From the Titan Nebula, they would enter darkspace, and would not wake again for six hundred years. Thrown through space and time to God knew where, to a place where no one knew her name and everything would be different. Where she could start new. Be someone else. 

She knew she should be afraid, what they were doing was ridiculous. But somewhere, deep down, she’d always wanted to fly, to fling herself as far as she could into the cosmos and see where she landed. Maybe it was the disease she’d so narrowly escaped when she was a teenager, the sense of death and stagnation that had always hovered around her, no matter how far she ran or how long it had been, that urged her on.

Maybe Andromeda would finally take that shroud away.

“You’re seriously excited for this?” Lukas asked, interrupting her thoughts.

Her mouth twitched. “Stop reading my mind.”

“I will not. Twin privileges.”

Saskia closed her eyes and breathed deep, letting the scent of her mother’s resting place fill her mind. Maybe she did want to remember it. For her mother, if not for her. “Yeah. I seriously am.”

“You’re so fucking weird. You won’t work up the courage to ask anyone out for a date the entire time you’re in college, but you want to jump into the next galaxy, no problem.”

She elbowed him in the ribs, but he only chuckled.

“I don’t know,” he murmured after a while. “I guess I am too. But this whole thing just seems… insane.”

“It is insane.”

“Right. But _really_ insane.”

“Is this finally the day you decide you're responsible and level-headed?”

He let out a long-suffering sigh and sat up. “Yeah, no. You're right. It’s too late for second thoughts, I guess. Dad would just beam down and punt me into space if I tried to stay.”

Saskia knew he was joking, that he would have mentioned his reservations long before now if they were serious. But she couldn’t help but notice the hard set of his eyes, the tightness in the corner of his mouth that spelled fear, and anxiety.

“It’s okay to be scared, Lukas.”

He swallowed and nodded, leaning down and giving her a quick peck on the forehead. “I know. I’m just getting all introspective.” He rose to his feet and pulled her upright with a dramatic heave. “I’m probably just hungry.”

Lukas turned to their mother’s tombstone and splayed his palm against her name, eyes rimmed in moisture. “Love you, Mom. Always.”

“Always,” Saskia echoed, taking her brother’s hand and squeezing. “She knows.”

He nodded, returning her squeeze and taking a deep breath as he turned away.

Saskia stared for one more moment at the tombstone that marked the last place that held her mother, the last place that sang of the only home they’d ever really known, the home that had never really _felt_ like home. Tomorrow marked the start of something wild and unknown. Her mother would know how important that was, and not begrudge her the urge to fly.

_One foot in the stars_ , she thought with the hint of a smile, turning away to walk with her brother toward whatever Andromeda held for them.


	2. Let Yourself Breathe

Saskia had been born and raised on Alliance vessels and space stations, the hum of a drive core or a mass effect field generator like a nursery rhyme, the chill of metal under her feet as natural to her as hardwood and carpet were to others. She knew the black depths of space, and had never been afraid.

But living in the Tempest, with SAM in her head and her crew watching her every move, waiting for the sign that she’d finally snapped and gone mad—was like the entire ship was shrieking. Like she was standing in a huge, empty room with thousands of unseen eyes pulling her apart. 

She tried to keep herself busy in-between missions, studying the Remnant technology, trying to learn as much as she could about the artificial intelligence currently residing in her mind like an unwelcome house guest, but it was hard to find anywhere to be alone, to be quiet. 

Liam had taken to checking in on her almost as much as Dr. T’Perro, or Lexi, as she had to keep reminding herself. After the disaster of Habitat-7, and the chaos on Eos, after he’d seen exactly how useless she was in a fight, he’d sought her out and tried to cajole her into a few gentle lessons about managing her stress. She knew he was just trying to be nice. And he was worried, clearly. He’d even gone so far as to mention that she ask Cora to help with her biotics. 

Like that would go well. The woman was angry, and hurt, and clearly blamed Saskia for their current, inexplicable reversal of roles. She’d been training to become Pathfinder for years. She was a machine, a force of nature. Focused, driven, firm—everything Saskia wasn’t. 

Saskia was a fumbling child. And it didn’t help that every time she closed her eyes, she saw her father falling to the ground in front of her, the memory of his unheard words ringing in her head like white noise. 

No, she was two seconds from breaking apart. Part of her wondered if SAM wasn’t holding her mental state in check just like he was the rest of her. If he hadn't reworked her mind into a compliant semblance of life when he also kept her from dying. Like she was some shell, packed to the brim with biotics she couldn’t control and an AI who kept her moving—one foot in front of the other, one thought after the next. 

And in the cavernous room of her private, _Pathfinder_ quarters, she could barely breathe without spiraling into the steady reality that she was the only thing standing between home for them all and a violent, horrible end at the hands of a malevolent alien species. 

So, like she’d used to do when she was young and Lukas had sought adventure on whatever ship their parents were currently stationed, when her thoughts began running through the labyrinth of her mind like a jumped-up mouse sprinting after some elusive, half-dreamed slice of cheese. She found herself a room off the research hub, filled it to the brim with broken machinery, spare parts, and every scrap of useless tech she could get her hands on, and locked herself inside. 

It’s what she always did when she couldn’t cope, couldn’t hear herself think for all the static. Machines were easy. Electrical grids, wires, and metal—clear, concise problems she could fix. She wasn’t good at it, not like Gil, whom she’d done her best to avoid out of fear that he might show an interest in what she was doing. But like everyone else, he watched her with wary eyes. 

Like he knew exactly how screwed they all were to have _her_ as a Pathfinder. 

It wasn’t the staring. That she was used to. She didn’t exactly look normal, with the silver hair and the eyes than shone like a fucking coin when you flashed a light on them. She looked like a ghost, like a strong wind could push her over if it thought hard enough. 

No, she knew exactly what everyone saw when they looked at her. The shadow of her father’s mistake. 

_It should have been Lukas_ , she thought, constantly, when her mind inevitably returned to obsessing about her brother lying unresponsive in Hyperion's cryo bay. He would have made a great Pathfinder—charismatic, brave, a bit mad, but in a way that made you feel like anything was possible. _It should have been him._

The only thing Saskia was good for was deciphering bits of Remnant information they’d managed to salvage from the vault on Eos, piecing it together like she used to do with Prothean technology and data, making something from nothing. Solving puzzles, picking apart a problem and finding the golden solution at the core. Numbers. Wires.  It was the only thing that made sense, ironically enough, after everything that had happened to her since waking. The ancient alien technology was the only thing that rang true in this entire God-forsaken galaxy.

Well, that, and meeting the Angara. 

For the first time since coming to Andromeda, after everything that had gone wrong on Habitat-7, and the scramble to figure out what they were up against on Eos, she’d felt… _awestruck_. Even in the Remnant vault that had stretched under Eos' surface like a vast network of synapses, her excitement had been couched in fear. Fear that she was about to die, that she had missed some crucial detail and had locked her, Cora, Liam, and their enthusiastic new friend Peebee in a glorified alien sewer system until they died from thirst. 

An actual, living, alien species that wasn’t trying to kill her—and she’d been the first to meet them. Or the first from Hyperion, at least. Sure, she’d been positive she was going to ruin any future relations with them by fumbling her way through an introduction. But meeting a new _species_ , learning about another culture— _that_ was what she’d come to Andromeda to do. Or, it was what she’d hoped would happen, in those dream-filled moments before falling asleep in one galaxy and waking in another. 

Having one actually join the crew was another matter entirely.

Jaal was… odd, and a little off-putting. She’d only spoken to him a few times, and only once when they were alone. She’d asked him about himself and he’d, well, not said much. Which she understood. He was alone on a ship of aliens. It made sense that he felt uncomfortable.

Though, he was doing better than her after only a week. She’d been on the Tempest for almost a month and she still felt like an imposter in someone else’s life. He was getting along with the crew, and everyone seemed to enjoy his company. 

Saskia knew she should make more of an effort, but talking to anyone these days felt like pulling teeth. She was distracted, distant. She’d never been much of a people person, _any_ of a people person, really, and separated from her brother—it was too much sometimes to just be around someone else. 

She liked Jaal, she supposed, or she liked what she knew of him. He was kind, even if he looked at her in a way that made her feel intensely uneasy. She might be used to the staring, but coming from him it felt too focused. Most people tried to hide their interest in her bleached features and distant stare. Maybe it was an angaran thing. 

Though, again, she expected nothing else. An outsider on a ship of, well, _aliens_ was bound to stare a bit. He seemed to be a curious person. And not particularly afraid of sharing his opinion. 

Which is why, one week after he’d joined the Tempest, with them well on their way to his home planet of Havarl, she’d frozen at the sight of him sitting in her room. 

Not in her _room_ , which would have been very strange indeed, but in the tech lab adjacent to the research hub, which housed all of her disorganized machine parts and projects. Her little slice of silence and serenity. 

He was bent over something in the back, _a cot_ , she realized with lurch, and didn’t see her standing in the open doorway like a fool. 

Saskia breathed for a second, trying to figure out how best to handle the situation. Suvi must have told him the room was unoccupied. Which, it was, as far as she was concerned. Saskia hadn’t told anyone she’d been using it and taken great pains to make sure no prying eyes had followed her in yet.

She was just starting to wonder if SAM had frozen her feet in place when he rose to his full, considerable height, and turned. 

“Oh,” he said, his deep voice rising in surprise. “Ryder. Hello.”

She blinked, mind fumbling over the sheer size of him. Even after a week, she was still stunned by how _large_ he was. Krogan might be wide, and turians tall, but he was the same height as Vetra, with shoulders that dwarfed even Drack. 

“Hi,” she breathed. 

Silence. They both stared at each other.

Finally, he coughed, expression flashing between confusion and discomfort. “Is there something you needed?” he asked, feline eyes wide. 

“Ah—well.” She cleared her throat. How was she supposed to kick him out? She had an entire apartment on the level below, and it wasn’t like the Tempest was a cruise ship. It was meant to house a small team. Every space was valuable. She knew that. 

But it didn’t help the surge of dread that sank into her stomach, the knowledge that her tiny haven had vanished without a warning. 

“You’re taking this room?” she finally asked, her mind revving back to life. 

“That was my plan. Your science officer,” he paused, considering, “ _Suvi_ , directed me here.” He cocked his head. “Is that… unacceptable?”

“No, God,” she muttered, “of course not. It’s fine. I just—didn’t know.”

“Your ship,” he said, grinning as if he were sharing some joke she didn't understand, “for all its wonders, is not very large.”

She just nodded, hating the idea that it was _her_ ship. It didn’t belong to her. It belonged to her father, the Pathfinder. 

“I—ah,” she gestured to the piles of discarded wiring and assorted tools on what little table-space there was in the tech lab, “I’ll get these out of your way. Sorry about the mess.”

“All this is your doing?” he asked, sounding genuinely surprised. 

She looked up in the process of gathering together a small console she’d been configuring to help with unscrambling the Remnant script locked to some artifacts they’d found in the vault on Eos. “Yes,” she said slowly.

“Are you an engineer?”

“No, not really. I just—putter.” She swallowed, heat rising up her neck at the interest in his expression. Angaran emotions were still an anomaly to her, but he seemed to broadcast every flicker and flash, every slight thought telegraphed clear and loud. It was—disarming.

“As do I,” he said with a laugh. “I am fond of taking things apart and putting them back together again. Call it a hobby of mine.”

Saskia’s eyes were drawn to his gun, sitting propped against the wall. “That explains your rifle.”

“I stole it from the kett.” He made to reach for it, but seemed to decide against it, and merely took a step toward her. “Made my own modifications. Increased the barrel size and smoothed out the heat sink. I find the practice soothing.”

She stopped herself from backing away. During their first meeting she’d realized how little the angara valued personal space. Or—how little _he_ did, at least. 

“Sure,” she said, trying not to stare too intently into his face. She'd learned the hard way that his eyes had a tendency to catch and hold her attention. 

She felt those eyes on her now as she tried to grab the rest of her things as quickly as possible. 

“Have I made you uncomfortable?” he asked, his voice so loud it made her jump.

“I— _shit_.” She nearly dropped a stack of papers she was balancing on top of an omni-tool augmentation she’d been tinkering with for the past week. 

Before she knew what was happening, he was standing very close to her and his hands were on her shoulders, steadying her before she fell. He held her in place for a moment, before quickly, efficiently, he re-ordered her papers. All the while he stared at her intently at her with a slight frown, as if she were some creature acting strangely in a zoo exhibit. He studied her expression, and returned his grip to her shoulders, holding her more gently this time, like he was trying to reassure her.

Saskia’s mind went blank at the apparent innocuousness of this casual touch, as if he were not an alien and she not... well, an _alien_ too. He was just so… _overwhelming_. 

“Are you well?” he asked, brow furrowing in increased concern. 

Her breath hitched and she coughed. “Yes, sorry. And, no. You haven’t done anything.”

“I have noticed that your people do not interact well with my—particular way of being.” He laughed, and she could feel it echo through his grip on her arms. “Angara do not hide our emotions, and I am still struggling to learn how best to navigate our new—partnership.” 

She blinked. “Has anyone been rude to you?”

He smiled, a brilliant, happy smile that made her think of sunlight and birds, and she had the sudden thought that his eyes were a rather lovely shade of blue. “Of course not. You all have been nothing but cordial and diplomatic. Therein lies my problem.”

_What is happening to me_ _?_ she thought, blinking at the sudden poetry flitting through her addled mind. “Oh. Right.”

He gave her a small squeeze, and backed away when he was sure she wasn’t going to fall all over herself. The place where his hands had been burned a little. In a not-entirely unpleasant way. 

“But I asked about _you_ , Ryder.” His voice dropped, and he looked around the tech lab. “I seem to have taken your workshop. I had wondered what exactly the function of this place was. Here I was thinking it no more than a dumping ground for various scrap, only to feel the fool now that I know it has already been claimed.”

“It’s—well I guess you have taken it,” she murmured.

He laughed as if she’d said something hilarious, and her brow furrowed. _How much does he do that?_

“But it wasn’t really mine. I was just borrowing it.” She shifted the things in her arms, a little disgruntled. “And it’s not all scrap.”

“And now I have offended you,” he mused, though she did catch a small amount of intention in his voice. “What a successful conversation we find ourselves in.”

“You haven’t offended me, really. I was just surprised, that’s all. The room is yours.” She took a breath, tried to smooth her brow. “I can get the rest of my things later.”

She backed away, only to pause at the door. She couldn’t shake the feeling that there was something she should say. He was, after all, part of… _her_ crew. He’d joined to help her win the Resistance over, and she was just… acting like a weird, distant asshole. 

“Do you—not want to stay in the crew quarters? Not—,” she added when his brow arched, “that you have to. I’m just curious.”

He was silent for a long time, long enough that she started to wonder if she’d said something rude. 

“You are all aliens to me,” he said, frankly, “and while I would not mean to insult anyone by taking a space of my own, it feels strange to stay with the others.”

“Oh.” Saskia relaxed, nodded. “Sure.”

Again, he frowned. “That does not trouble you?”

She studied his face. He seemed confused, for some reason. A play of emotions on his face, moving faster than she would have thought possible. How he didn’t get whiplash was beyond her. 

“Of course not. Why do you think I holed myself in here in the first place?”

He inclined his head, a wry smile on his lips. “I had not considered that.” His voice softened, grew resonant with a kind of weight that pulled at something within the echoes of her static chest. “I… I would not uproot you from your sanctuary.”

“It’s not like that,” she said, the lie feeling strange on her lips. “I just—it’s yours. No worries.”

“Thank you, Ryder.” He looked down at her arms. Took a breath, and his features settled into determination. “I will help you move your things.”

“I don’t—”

“I insist.” He held out his hands, and waited. 

It took her a moment, but she transferred what she was holding to him, only letting one battery pack fall to the ground. While he seemed not to mind her continually brushing his hands, gloved though they might be, it was—odd, and made her feel very aware of her own body. He was just so big, and everywhere. She had a hard time looking at anything else. 

“What is it you were working on, if you do not mind me asking?”

“Um,” she mumbled, distracted, kneeling down and gathering up a few defunct soldering guns she’d borrowed from Gil, “a bit of this, a bit of that. It’s more just—to keep my hands busy. I'm trying to work out those Remnant codes.” She gestured over her shoulder to the stack of papers in his hands. “They have this double encryption on the monoliths on Eos. I’m hoping I can figure out a faster way for me to unlock the interface without standing at the consoles and doing it all manually. I wouldn’t mind so much, but I know that the others would rather not just watch me solve puzzles for an hour.” 

She rose and turned, only to find him standing very close to her, all the things he’d been holding transferred to a crate he’d produced from… somewhere. 

“Oh, ah, thanks.” She swallowed and slipped around him, past stacks of what she assumed were the things he’d brought from Aya.

“This involves a device?” he prompted, following her as she tripped over the pile of empty medi-gel containers by the door that she’d meant to repurpose into field storage for any plant specimens they might encounter, but hadn’t found the time.

Out of the corner of her eye, she saw him move forward to help her, but she managed to catch herself, meeting his gaze and looking away again as she blushed. God, she was making an ass of herself, wasn’t she?

“Hopefully, if I can manage it. SAM might be smart, but he’s still a little dense when it comes to logic puzzles.” She hesitated, struck by the strange sensation that the AI would be able to hear her. She wondered if he’d be offended. If it was even possible for him to be. 

“I want to rig my omni-tool. Or I want to try. These newer models are tricky, not as many parts to fiddle with, but I think I can manage. I’m used to the older ones we had back in the Milky Way. Clunkier and more prone to frying out if you overworked them, but there was more room to play. Oh.” 

She turned around and held out her left arm, flicking her hand with the proper mental prompt to open her display. “I mean this. I’m not sure if angara have something analogous, or…” She trailed off, suddenly conscious of the fact that he’d been silent for a long time. Without realizing, she’d just launched into an explanation he might not even understand. 

Jaal was watching her, a curious, disbelieving smile on his lips. “We do. Though it is not the same, as angara interact with the interface through the electromagnetic impulses that run across our skin.”

“Right,” she breathed, stepping forward and depositing the last of her things into the crate he held out. “That would make things more complicated. Or easy, depending on how you look at it. I guess.”

Silence. She looked up at him, feeling strangely like she should be saying something, but had no idea what. Those eyes of his made her feel like she was being scanned, catalogued, investigated. It wasn't unpleasant, but she certainly was used to attention that was so... intimate. 

“I did not know you were capable of speaking so much,” he said, amusement obvious in his voice. 

She blinked, her lips parting in surprise. “I—what is that supposed to mean?”

“When we first met, you were stoic, short. You did not seem inclined to say more than was necessary.” He cocked his head. “An interesting tactic, as you allowed Evfra to speak as much as he liked. He might play the grizzled commander, but he does so love the sound of his own voice.”

She breathed past the heat in her chest, tried to reconcile the idea that anyone would think her stoic. Quiet, maybe. Weird, definitely. “I was nervous.”

“One could understand why, given the situation.” 

“Okay, well…” She shook her head, wondering what he wanted her to say.

“I simply did not realize this was the case.” His voice dropped, softened, as he stepped toward her. The crate was still in his hands, but she had the odd sensation that he was holding something else out to her, a bridge, or a place to start. “It is fascinating.”

“Oh.” She frowned, heartbeat kicked up a notch. She didn’t know what it was, but there was something about him that made her feel like a light was shining on her skin. It wasn’t warmth... that same attention, maybe, as if every facet of his being was trained on her at that one moment, assessing—watching. 

“Thank you,” she said, her voice small and breathy, “I think.”

He hummed a laugh, the sound vibrating through his chest and making her spine buzz. 

“You are a curious woman, Saskia Ryder.” He paused, a deep line etched in his brow. “Elusive, frayed, yet unraveling. Like a pebbled surface over dark water—there are depths to you, I think, that you do not show to most.”

Her lips parted, and the nerves lodged firmly in her chest relaxed. She felt time slow to the pulse of her heart, the heat that rolled like a wave down her spine. 

_Holy shit._

Part of her knew that he didn’t mean anything by it. He’d said it himself, the angara were an emotional, expressive people. This was just… something for him to say, like it might be normal for someone to comment on another person’s clothes. And she didn’t know if she liked his assessment, exactly. Unraveling hit too close to the mark.

But it wasn't _fear_ that curled in her stomach and purred like a house cat. 

“You’re big on the loaded compliments,” she finally managed, unable to pull her gaze from his. It had its own gravitational pull. In that giddy moment, she wanted to let herself fall into it.

It was his laugh, booming, leaping, making her own stomach jump in excitement, that released her from the gravity of his attention. 

“Believe it or not, you are not the first person to express such a thing.” He chuckled, his laughter not dying, but bouncing around the room like a ball losing momentum. “You are the first human, however. Take solace in that.”

Her lips pursed as she felt them tug into a small, hesitant smile. “If you say so.” She moved out of the tech lab, waiting for him to follow, keeping her eyes down. 

She might have lost her sanctuary, as he’d so artfully put it, but she felt like she’d gained something else. A friend, maybe. Who seemed not to have any intention of tip-toeing around her. The idea that someone on this ship wasn’t waiting for her to explode was… comforting. 

It was a few hours later, as she sat in her room, her _real_ room, with the littered remains of her projects spread out across the pristine floor, that she realized she hadn’t felt the need to crawl for the nearest corner since Jaal had left her. And the static in her mind didn’t bother her so much. 


	3. Ancient Glow

When Saskia was young, her family had been stationed on an Alliance cruiser orbiting Jupiter for a few months, doing routine sweeps of the asteroid belt, checking their borders. Even almost thirty years after the First Contact War, everyone was waiting for the other shoe to drop. 

There had been a paleobotanist working as a contractor for the team exploring Europa, digging into the ice and seeing if there was any viable plant life in the frigid waters they could study. The old woman had been full of stories, having worked in the most lush habitats Earth had to offer. She spun pictures of vines that crawled like snakes across the floor of a rainforest, and trees as tall as skyscrapers. Saskia had wrung every bit of information out of her in the two weeks their paths had crossed, falling asleep at night to tales of singing forests and a world that hid as much as it showed.

Havarl was beyond anything Saskia could have imagined as a child. The rose-tinted sky that greeted them as they broke through the atmosphere, the swaying, shifting wings, or some kind of appendage she didn’t yet have a name for, of the mantas as they made their slow, patient pilgrimage across twisted mazes of buzzing vines and electric-glow leaves that dwarfed her entire body. The planet was alive, bristling with sensation and thought, like a pulsing network of connection that sang inside her bones. 

Stepping off the Tempest had become a study in hardening herself, of shoring up her fragile psyche to combat whatever this galaxy had to throw at her next, but Havarl was like stepping into a warm pool. Tension bled off her the longer she walked among the sweet-smelling air, eyes drawn to towering spires when the canopy over her head broke, or a quick flash of metal revealed a hidden node of pulsing rock. 

It was frightening, yes, and she could sense the corruption that thrummed deep at the center of the planet within moments of making their way across broken platforms that creaked with age and disrepair on their way to Paalev. The animals were wild and bloody and the colors were too bright, too twisted, the wrapped coils of vines that threaded over black stone cut sharp by ancient hands almost moving before her very eyes. 

But unlike Eos, where the air stung her lungs and the sun cut lines across her vision, Havarl was soft, diffused, specks of glittering pollen drifting past them on vibrating invisible threads like star dust. Even Aya was loud and chaotic, a jumble of foreign tongues and the weight of unfamiliar eyes hanging on her like a mantle. 

Havarl was dying, but there was a beauty to its erosion. However horrible it might be. 

They tracked Jaal’s missing scientists to the base of a monolith, spaced around the center console like statues, witnesses to a forgotten rite. 

Saskia moved through them slowly, silently motioning for Jaal and Liam to hang back, in case she activated the Remnant defenses by mistake. SAM’s influence filtered through her thoughts, and she tried to ignore the flicker of dread that it roused in her stomach. She was still unused to the extra sentience, even as her mind became accustomed to his touch. It made her uneasy, to wonder if one day it might not bother her at all. 

Her father might have developed the AI for his personal use and wanted the added benefits that it could offer, but she was not her father. A fact this new _home_ of hers would never let her forget. 

The tips of her fingers tingled as she raised them over the interface, and she took a deep breath, bracing for the surge of connection. 

It rolled over her like a wave, and she flinched, waiting as her mind went white and then began to reform itself—strange algorithms and code marching through her thoughts like little soldiers, trailing an unfamiliar light behind them. 

It was only the fourth time she’d interfaced with this kind of console, but she was starting to think that SAM wasn’t the only force at work during the instant she melded with the ancient system. It wasn’t a consciousness, not like SAM, but an alien understanding, brief and ephemeral, yet vast in that one blinding moment when SAM opened her mind enough to interact with the Remnant technology, flying down pathways of unexplored thought that vanished the moment she turned a corner.

The connection released. The angara awoke, and she tried to explain as best she could what had happened to them, though it was easier to let Jaal take the lead. His eyes kept falling on her during the conversation, a strange light in them that made her skin hum like the structure around her. 

She’d gone to the tech lab a few times since she’d taken her things, checking in with him and trying to make an effort to get to know him better. Even with him there, in a place that had once been empty but for her thoughts and fears, the room was quiet—safer, somehow, than the rest of the ship. Like the Remnant tech, he was just so _strange_ and new that it was easier to accept his presence than anything else. There was nothing she could compare him to, nothing in him that pulled at the strings tangled around her heart that chained her to the Initiative, to Hyperion, to her dead father and her brother lying unconscious in a sterile room. Alone. While she scrambled to find him a home to wake up to.

The scientists took their leave, all of them reluctant to let her out of their sight, as if she’d performed a miracle. 

She supposed she had, in a way, or that’s what it would seem like to them. 

“Gonna go check the perimeter,” Liam said, unholstering his rifle and giving her a nod in approval, “make sure none of those freaky robots decided to join the party. Do your thing.”

“Be careful,” she said before she could stop herself. Of course he would be careful. He knew what he was doing. Unlike her, he wasn’t chosen for this because of nepotism, but because he was capable and quick, a soldier trained to deal with a crisis.

He gave her a wide smile and a stupid wink. “ ’Course, Pathfinder. You know me. Quiet like a mouse and back before you can miss me.”

Saskia watched him leave, struck at once by how similar he was to Lukas. They weren’t the same, obviously—Liam acknowledged that he was an idiot sometimes, and there was a frantic energy to him that was different from Lukas’ manic charm. But it was enough to make her heart clench and ache. To wonder how different this would all be with Lukas at her side. 

“I confess,” Jaal started, and she jumped when she realized that he’d been standing only a few feet away, watching her watch Liam, “I had my doubts about your ability to follow through on your claim to mastery over the Remnant.”

She let out a small, sharp laugh. “Mastery. That’s funny.”

“Is it?” he asked, stepping aside as she walked back to the console. “I do not understand the joke.”

A smile tugged at the corner of her mouth, but she merely turned back to him and said, “I haven’t mastered the Remnant. I’ve hacked a piece of it, that’s all. And that was just by luck.”

_And Dad’s sacrifice._

“You were able to do something my people, in nearly a century, have not.” He didn’t sound bitter, just… sad. As if he felt all that time, all that pain, himself, acutely. “You are a marvel.”

Saskia held his gaze, trying not to let the giddy surge of excitement overwhelm her. He didn’t understand how that would come across. There was no reason to get excited. 

And excited about what, exactly? She barely knew the man—or, _alien_ , she supposed. They were closer to acquaintances than anything else. He was just… new. Fresh. Uncomplicated. 

She turned away, grateful for the dim, blue light that would hopefully hide her blush. She just wasn’t used to anyone giving her this kind of attention. That was all. 

“You could say that I did it just to stay alive.” She didn’t look up, not knowing how her joke would come across. “Now you won’t have to kill me in my sleep.”

He laughed, and it was a fight to keep from grinning like an idiot. 

“A happy thought, indeed,” he hummed as he walked around her, his presence moving like a glittering shadow across her back. “The universe would be a darker place for your absence, Saskia Ryder.”

She kept her eyes glued to the console. “So,” she murmured, frowning as she let SAM catalogue the symbols to cross-reference against the database he’d begun to compile, “you didn’t think I was telling the truth about the vaults?”

“I did not think you were lying,” he said, stepping around the console to stand opposite her. He rested his gun on his shoulder, relaxing into a slightly less imposing figure. “But I had my doubts.” 

A deep-bellied chuckle made her eyes flick upward. 

“It is not every day an alien arrives and claims she can solve a problem the angara have been puzzling over as long as I've been alive. Do _you_ think it would be wise to take such a claim into my heart without reservation?”

She blinked, focusing on the softness to his features, the diffused light making his skin dark, almost purple. If she looked close enough, she could almost imagine the current of energy than ran across his face and eyes, that pulsed in time with the ground beneath his feet and the air that curled around him. 

“That’s a lot of trust to put in someone,” she said, voice small. “Especially after everything that’s happened with the kett.”

He sighed, smiling sadly, though she caught the flash of anger that echoed through his eyes. “You have your answer for Evfra’s reluctance to work with you, and many of my people’s animosity.”

“Not yours though?” she asked, finally letting the question that had been hanging in the back of her mind surface. 

Jaal was putting a lot on faith that the Initiative wouldn’t just turn around and screw him over. It wasn’t like humans hadn’t done worse to their own over their long and bloody history, and that was before they knew that they weren’t alone in the universe. She knew there were some who would be more than happy to exploit the angara for their own purposes, and not only the humans. Tann, for one, and a few others on the Nexus, she was sure. 

He said nothing for a long time, and the silence was weighty with the decision forming behind his bright eyes. “No, Saskia Ryder,” he finally said, voice solemn. “You do not have my animosity. But neither do you have my full trust.” A flicker moved across his face, brow furrowing and then smoothing just as quickly. “Not yet.”

She blinked a few times, the heat in her chest dispersing as quickly as it had come, leaving her feeling like she’d just been doused in a cold lake. 

“Right. Of course.” She swallowed back the lump in her throat. “Thank you for your honesty,” she said, haltingly, looking back down at the console. 

Well, if her frayed mind had been spinning wild fantasies that he thought she was anything other than a stranger whose motivations were still unknown and suspect, that had settled it. 

“I’m going to look at this interface again before we leave,” she said, more purposefully this time, her voice getting that metallic sheen that her brother used to call her ‘business tenor.’ “We should get back to Paalev to make sure your people made it home safely.” 

A silence, but she didn’t look up to see what fueled it. 

“I—would agree.” His voice was smaller, more cautious. “The wilds are unforgiving, even for those who have dwelt in them for years.”

Saskia saw him hesitate out of the corner of her vision, but then he moved off, leaving her to study the Remnant technology in peace. 

She let the lingering disappointment of his distance go. She was being stupid, she knew that, but a part of her wondered at the sudden shift in his demeanor. It wasn’t the first time he’d turned on a dime and stopped a conversation just as they were gaining traction. He ran hot and cold, but he didn’t seem to be doing it on purpose. Another problem in translating across their cultures, probably. 

“This is ridiculous,” she murmured, exhaling and shaking her head. 

“Are you having trouble with the Remnant symbols, Pathfinder?” SAM asked, startling her so thoroughly that she lost her place. 

Her heart skipped a beat. “ _Jesus_ , no. No, it’s not—” She closed her eyes and bent forward to press her forehead against the cold metal of the Remnant console. “Don’t worry about it.”

_This is going to make me go mad._ It was bad enough the AI in her brain might pick up on the confusion of her emotions, worse that she wasn’t even safe in the comfort of her own thoughts. 

Her breath ghosted against console, cold and reassuring under her cheek. Dimly, she knew that she probably shouldn’t be putting her face on a surface that definitely might poison her, but it was nice, chill and smooth like the floor of a ship or the flat metal of a work table. And if she did get poisoned, maybe they’d let her take a back seat to this whole leadership thing. Put Cora in charge, and she could just advise, or something. 

There was a quiet to the gentle humming of the overgrowth around her, twining through the Remnant structure, the soft glow of its foliage soothing against her eyelids. The air was sweet, tinged with the scent of something like honey and spiced fruit, with the faint tang of corruption running underneath. 

Liam’s voice cut through her momentary peace. “You all right, Pathfinder?” 

Saskia lurched upright to find him and Jaal watching her with matching expressions of confusion and concern. 

“Yep. Great.” Her voice was clipped and tinny, but it at least wasn’t breaking. “Have everything, SAM?”

“I have collected all relevant data from the console.”

“Let’s go, then.” She turned, and clambered awkwardly over the raised dais, slipping over vines and broken stone, trying not to look at either of her companions. 

_Breathe through the clutter_ , she heard her mother’s voice remind her, comforting as it enveloped her thoughts. _It’s just your mind trying to find its place and peace._

As they walked through the tangled ruins of Havarl, Liam and Jaal discussing something in happy, pleasant voices behind her, she wondered if her mind wasn’t already fighting a losing battle. 


	4. Crossed Wires

“I understand, Lexi,” Saskia said, for perhaps the sixth time as the asari followed her from the Tempest’s bridge.

“Do you?” Her voice was hard, that perfect mixture of stern disappointment and endearing exasperation that Saskia had come to find surprisingly comforting. “Because I feel like my words are flying straight over your head.”

“Is that supposed to be a joke about my height?”

Lexi said nothing as they stopped at the research hub, staring at her with a furrowed brow, and the start of a smile.  “I would never make fun of one of my patients. But I’m serious, Saskia,” her voice dropped again, eyes intent and analyzing, “you need to be more careful in the field. You weren’t trained for combat, not for _this_ kind of combat, anyway. Let everyone else take the hits. You and SAM can hang back. You’re more valuable alive than with your spine broken.”

Saskia took a deep breath, trying not to wince as her shoulder throbbed. “I know. But I can’t help if a wraith throws me ten feet into the air.”

Lexi shook her head, lips pursed. 

Saskia really hadn’t been trying to get into the fight. She was more than happy to let Cora and Vetra wade into the fray while she monitored their shields and did what she could with her poor excuse for gunfire. Against the Remnant, or someone with a working omni-tool, she was more help. Hacking technology and turning it against itself was becoming her speciality, and she’d even managed to overload the shield generator on a Hydra once. But wraiths didn’t have wires or a net connection. And they were rather fast, as she had figured out to her shoulder’s detriment. 

“I’ve been studying your charts again,” Lexi said, a decision forming behind her eyes that made Saskia nervous, “wondering how someone with no outward sign of biotic training was given one of the newer implants before we left the Milky Way. That’s a lot of firepower for someone who never uses it.”

Saskia’s stomach bottomed out. She knew exactly what the doctor was about to imply, and readied herself for it. 

“Have you ever considered getting a rudimentary understanding of applying your biotics in combat situations? It might help in these kinds of situations, when you’re pressed and out of options. Normally I wouldn’t recommend it, but you have the unfortunate luck to be in a position that requires a certain amount of protection.”

“It wouldn’t work.” Saskia looked away, wondering how quickly she could extricate herself. “I wasn’t given an L5 to fight. It just helps me manage pain and not generate mass effect fields when I stub my toe.”

That door had been closed since her disease had worked its chaos on her nervous system. It would be like trying to tunnel through a collapsed building with nothing but a toothpick. Or dancing a waltz while someone was slowly drilling into her head. 

“Because of your… condition, I know.” Lexi’s brow furrowed in concern. “It’s an option worth exploring, is all. You might find—”

Saskia was saved the trouble of explaining, again, how there was no reason to hope after six years that she’d somehow be able to utilize her abilities now, by a loud yell of frustration and a clang of metal. 

She turned, peering into the tech lab to see Jaal pacing at the back of the room, hands balled in front of him as if he were trying not to punch something. 

“Jaal,” Lexi called casually, “is everything all right in there?”

His shoulders rose and fell in an exaggerated breath, before he turned to face them both. “I am simply confounded, once again, by your Initiative’s insistence on designing their technology for hands so small they cannot possibly exist. Do robots assemble _all_ your machinery, or is there some other race of sentient life that traveled with you from the Milky Way with miniscule fingers?”

“Not that I know of, but the Nexus is large and life full of mystery,” Lexi mused, stepping back and sharing one cursory look of amusement with Saskia, before her eyes hardened. “Let me know if your pain gets worse.”

Saskia nodded, glad that the doctor decided to leave her suggestion be, for now, at least. 

Jaal’s eyes flashed between them as she left, honing in on Saskia. “Are you injured, Ryder?”

“It’s nothing,” she said quickly, peering around his massive shoulders. “What are you working on that requires such a delicate hand?”

“It is—well, I would _like_ it to be a grenade.” He huffed, threw one hand into the air. “But your people’s electronic interfaces are so small that I cannot get my fingers through the back panel of the charger let alone work on the internal detonator without blowing up your ship.”

“That would not be ideal, no.” She studied him, realizing that he wasn’t wearing his customary flowing blue tunic, just a body suit with the sleeves rolled up to his elbows. It made his chest look ridiculously sculpted, and only emphasized the breadth of his shoulders. 

Saskia looked away before she could start staring. “How do angara make their grenades then? I assume they’re not much larger than ours.”

“Not much, no, but they’re designed in a way that is _logical_ , rather than a convoluted miniature of what they should be.” His voice was loud, indignant, but he didn’t seem angry, just… confused. Comically so. “Is it an attempt at artistry that I am missing? Some kind of test to weed out the unworthy, or simply a barrier against people without underdeveloped appendages?”

“I’m pretty sure it’s not a practical joke, if that makes you feel better.”

“It does not.”

She found herself trying very hard not to smile. He was just so… energetic. Every inflection was heightened, every frustration or joy magnified. Like a glittering sun casting rays on everything he touched, sometimes searing, but more often warm. Light. 

It made it harder to remember that she was supposed to be professional and give him space.

“I don’t know much about grenades, but I’d be happy to take a look,” she offered, realizing soon after that he might not want company. He’d made it pretty clear that there were levels his _trust_ didn’t extend. 

He stilled, and turned to her, a smile breaking across his features. “Of course. You are very small. Perhaps you will have more luck with the tiny grenade.”

She exhaled through her nose, her quick laugh bottled into something closer to a hum. “I am smaller than _you_ , maybe.” 

“Is your height not an anomaly among humans? Liam is of normal height. As is Cora, though, admittedly, you are only a few inches shorter than she is.”

“There’s more variation in human height,” she said as she moved into the tech lab, trying not to see all the differences from when she’d spent her free time in it. “So no, I am not an anomaly. But I am on the small end of the spectrum.”

“I see.”

She stopped at his work table, relatively organized for someone who just threw something across the room. She studied the grenade, seeing the source of his problem, and cocked her head. 

“I’ve never been very good with weapons,” she murmured, pick up the device and peering down at it, following the wiring and trip mechanism that would release…  “Is this a retrofitted EMP?”

“It is,” he said, sounding pleased.

A shadow fell across her hands, and she felt him move very close behind her. He was looking over her shoulder, his head so close that if she moved, her hair would brush his face. 

Heart roused into a slow, building tempo, she chastised herself. He was just not accustomed to human norms. Hell, there were some humans she’d met who didn’t understand the concept of personal space. It was just his electromagnetism making the hair on the back of her neck rise.

“I need a little light,” she said, voice small. 

“Oh. Of course.” He moved away and she relaxed, only to tense a second later as he returned, even closer this time, and held a flashlight over her shoulder. 

She sucked her lower lip between her teeth, caught between grinning and trying to keep her breath steady. It was just her luck that she’d started to develop… _something_ for the alien determined to unconsciously push against all her boundaries. 

“Thank you,” she managed, trying to ignore him so she could focus. 

It only took a moment to determine what he was trying to do, and she set about detaching the detonator from the electronic core. 

Her mind slowed along with her heartbeat as she dipped into that happy, peaceful place of solitude that opened for her when she began her work. Orderly, neat, problems and solutions lining up in quick succession for her to examine and accept, or dismiss. Things were always clearer on the inside of a machine, even one as small as this. 

Though, she preferred to work with constructs that had some semblance of life to them. It felt more like a dance, or what she assumed a dance felt like, having never really experienced the kind performed with a partner. The grenade was lifeless, but it didn’t have the cold finality of some guns she’d tried to reconfigure. Weapons were boring, two-dimensional things that had complex solutions to a simple problem—that of causing as much destruction as they possibly could.

Complex problems that hid simple solutions—drawing and filtering water from moisture in the air, processing a long line of code to make a robot capable of choosing the correct medicine for presented symptoms—where were her heart truly lay. She’d been planning on shopping around tech companies on Illium before her father had approached her and Lukas about the Initiative. 

The irony of her current situation was not lost on her. SAM was incredible, an AI so advanced she wasn’t even sure what it was doing half the time. Her father had stumbled into a miracle, one she might have salivated over if she knew the full extent of its capabilities. If it wasn’t currently inside her own head. If it hadn’t been put there because of her father’s death. 

She reached without thought to the shelf hanging over the workspace, fumbling with the edge of a container she’d left when Jaal took up residence in her tech lab. The box didn’t budge, and she frowned, still not looking up from the device as she searched blindly. 

“Allow me to assist,” Jaal said, voice low and ghosting over the side of her neck. She froze, not realizing what he meant, until hands were on her waist and she was being lifted nearly a foot into the air. 

A small squeak broke from her lips as her hand clenched around the shell of the grenade, her eyes wide and unfocused as a starburst went off somewhere in the vicinity of her lower spine and sent heat fissioning through every synapse in her mind and every nerve in her body. It was… Well, it was certainly something she hadn’t experienced… ever. 

With fingers that moved like they’d just been doused in lead, she rooted through the box of tools for the few small implements that would let her pry apart the internal wiring board, and coughed. “Thank you, Jaal. You can put me down now.”

Her blood was pounding so loudly in her ears that she entirely missed what he said next. Somewhere, if there was a God, they were laughing at her attempts not to melt into a puddle of sparking goo on the floor.

She didn’t think she’d ever been touched so thoroughly, so _frequently_ , by anyone other than her family and doctors, and the sensation was just a _bit_ different. And he had no idea. This was normal for him.

Her shoulder spasmed, a corresponding shard of pain lancing through her left temple. She exhaled sharply and winced. 

“Did I hurt you?” Jaal asked in abrupt concern. “I am—”

“No, it’s not you. I twisted my shoulder a few days ago on Eos.” She cleared her throat again as the pain in her temple eased, a little hitch catching in her voice as she said, “Sorry, what did you say?”

“I asked where you developed your technological prowess.” His voice was entirely normal, if still cautious, but he clearly had no idea of the effect he had on her. _Good._ That was good. “Did you study under a scientist?”

“Not exactly,” she said, keeping her eyes glued to the device as she tried to find that calm center again, that blissful order. But she was having a hard time remembering what she had needed the tools for in the first place, a giddy, roiling pulse sending shivers through her chest. “I went to school, to college, I mean, but I started out studying history. I had the idea that’d I become a teacher.”

“Really?”

Her small annoyance at the incredulity in his tone helped her focus, and she bent over the device to hide her frown. “Yes. Though I transitioned into archeology and paleotechnology once I started learning more about the Protheans.”

“Who are…?” he prompted, once again taking residence behind her shoulder, flashlight pointed at her fingers as she threaded a wire into the device so she could pop out the back console without losing all the work he’d done to connect the electronic core to the detonator. 

“Similar to the Remnant, actually. A hyper-advanced race that just disappeared one day. Though we know a bit more about them.” 

She blinked, mind splintering as she realized that she would never be able to study the Protheans again, to learn more about the ancient civilization that had made this whole mad dash across the universe possible. The thought rang hollow in her chest. All those years wondering what exactly had been the cause of their disappearance, why they had left all their technology behind and just… vanished. And she would never know the reason why. 

“The asari had been studying them for centuries, millennia, maybe, when we humans showed up,” she continued, realizing that she’d lapsed into silence. “But they’re the reason we gained interstellar travel in the first place. They developed this technology that warped darkspace with the use of mass effect fields, effectively rocketing a ship from one point to another with a bit of quantum entanglement.”

“I suppose it is comforting to know that the universe is equally as shrouded in mystery however far you fly.” 

She was surprised she didn’t detect any sarcasm in his voice. “I guess.”

“And you found your love of technology at this time? During… school?”

It took her a moment to respond, disconnecting the last piece of the panel that housed the electronic core and reconfiguring it. 

“No,” she murmured. “I’ve always loved this kind of thing.” She hesitated, knowing that she could leave it there and it wouldn’t be a lie, not exactly. She turned, slowly, and she was abundantly grateful that he backed up to give her some space. 

His face was open, curious, waiting for her to continue. He seemed genuinely interested. That brightness that lingered in his eyes pulled at something inside her, sharp, a little ragged, that she didn’t like picking at. 

She didn’t talk about that dark time, not even with Lukas, really. It wasn’t something she liked to remember, shrouded in a depression so bleak it was hard to imagine she’d ever left that place. Sometimes she truly didn’t. 

“I got sick when I was sixteen,” she said, something in his eyes drawing out her words. “I couldn’t leave my house for almost a year and I felt like I was going crazy with nothing to do, so I just started taking all the appliances apart and putting them back together. I’d always been like that, but it didn’t become an obsession until I had nothing else to distract me.” She shrugged. “Eventually I moved onto higher level stuff like computers and omni-tools.”

Sympathy transformed his face, and a sad, knowing smile pulled at his lips. “My people have a saying which, roughly translated, means, ‘It is the pain that defines which mends and illuminates the true path.’ ”

Saskia held his gaze as discomfort fell into the pit of her stomach. 

She’d heard similar things before, that adversity made people stronger, that tragedy and death brought people together. A few therapists had tried to reconstruct the apparatus around which she viewed her disease, making it some trial she needed to overcome to get stronger. That dealing with her mother’s death and finding the strength in it would eventually make it easier to accept. That the chronic pain she’d dealt with the past six years, when her biotics decided to disconnect and run wild if left unchecked, somehow built character. 

Even if he didn’t mean that, and was just trying to sympathize or comfort her, it rang close to the pedantic help of so many who’d wanted her to get on with her life. She’d learned quickly that it was easier to just nod and listen, and figure it out on her own time. Which she had, eventually. She wasn’t plagued by nightmares anymore, or the claustrophobic anxiety that seized and held her for hours at a time. It was easier. Or it had been, before she came to Andromeda.

Her days and nights were now filled with sharper, wilder fears.

“That’s one way to think about it,” she finally said, looking down at the device in her hands. She held it out to Jaal, not looking up. “You should be able to interface with it more easily now, though you might want to ask Gil for his precision tools. They’ll help if you can’t find someone with small hands next time.”

“I am in your debt, Saskia Ryder.” His voice was gentle, hesitant as he reached out for the device. His hand brushed hers, and this time she was ready for the odd sensation. She didn’t know if it was the electromagnetic current over his skin, or if she was just inventing it, but it was… really nice. Like a tiny wave of static energy that pulled at the fine hair on her arms and made it stand on end. 

“It’s no problem, really.” She pulled her hand back and moved around him, letting the old pain slough off. _Like water off a duck’s back_ , as her mother used to say. “I’m happy to help.”

Saskia was at the door when Jaal said, still gentle, but determined this time, “Would you like to use this room again?”

She paused, blinked, and turned to find him watching her with… apprehension? “No, it’s your space. I told you—”

“You misunderstand. I meant—” His brow furrowed as he looked away and composed himself. “Ah—we could… share it?”

It took her a moment, but then her mouth opened in surprise. “Oh.”

“Unless I am mistaken, that is what friends do, yes?” He looked almost pained, as if he were trying very hard not to offend her. “In your—culture?”

She stared at him. 

_Friends_. 

“I am used to more people, more noise and life, than is found on your ship,” he continued, voice growing thick with emotion. “Your crew has been very nice, but you all seem content to segment and isolate yourselves with only some interaction with others.” He frowned. “It is odd.”

Was he… lonely?

“We’re all still getting to know each other,” she said, finding her voice as her mind raced to catch up. “Give it time.” 

He wanted to be friends? The idea was—surprisingly affecting. 

It also ran counter to what he’d told her on Havarl. 

“You said,” she started, trying not to sound accusatory, “you didn’t trust me.”

He was frozen for a moment and then he sighed, deeply. 

“Yes. I did.” His eyes softened, an imploring thread reaching out to her with its own gravitational pull. “But that does not mean I would not like to _try._ ”

She searched his face, a small trickle of warmth bleeding into her chest. _Well that’s…_

“Of course,” she heard herself admit, and was surprised at the relief in it. “I would like that.”

His smile was so quick and bright it almost hurt to look at. 

“Excellent. That would also make me abundantly happy.”

She found herself focusing on the cut of his lips, on the fresh, vibrant pink of his skin that seemed to glow, and his eyes, pools of reflective water that shone with something like sunlight. 

_Friends_. She didn’t have many friends, and she wasn’t very good at keeping them. Maybe it was time she try harder. 

“Good,” she said, pulling her gaze away and turning for the research hub. “I’ll see you later, then.”

“Stay clear, Saskia Ryder, and _strong_ ,” he exclaimed, clenching his hand into a fist to punctuate his words. 

She froze, looked back at him. Her mouth pulled into a smile and laughter fell from her lips, quiet, a little incredulous. 

He only seemed to expand when he saw her smile, laughing along with her, his deep, resounding joy making her own sound like a thin strand of chimes. 

“I’ll try,” she managed, pulling her mouth back in line. “Jaal,” she added, her eyes meeting his once before she turned and left. 

_The strangest person…_ she thought, heading back down the galley to the ladder for the lower deck. The doors to the bridge opened, and she nearly ran into Suvi and Vetra as they stopped talking. 

“Hello,” Saskia said, unable to hide her smile as she nodded at the pair. 

They exchanged a glance, Suvi smiling in surprise and Vetra raising the equivalent of an eyebrow. 

“Ryder,” Vetra said, drawing out her name as Saskia hit the floor and opened the door to her room. 

She had a feeling that there were some things she would never get used to about her new… friend. Her buzzing, _abundantly happy_ , friend. 

But she wanted to try. 


	5. Stranger in a Strange Land

Jaal had always been one to throw caution to the winds, to take risks, to seek the thrill of the new and the exciting. He was Sahuna Ama Darav’s favorite child, after all, borne of a woman who had courted his father by luring him into an ambush of adhi so she could prove her ability to defend him and their future children.

When he was eight, he had climbed to the highest peak he could find, a slice of Remnant architecture that loomed over his childhood home like an obelisk of the past, and prepared to throw himself off, convinced he had yet to grow wings like the mantas that filled his imagination and dreams. That he only needed to encourage them to sprout, like the snake-birds that nested in the canopies of Havarl. If his older sister had not followed and pulled him back at the last second, his life might have ended then in a burst of poorly-directed longing. 

As he grew older, his passion was molded and forged into a hard, burning thing—to see the restoration of his people, to free them from the vile Kett that threatened his family, his loved ones, his very existence as Angara. But he had never let go of that instinct to _jump_. 

This, he told himself, as he adjusted to life amongst aliens with strange behaviors inside a starship that might have once been the progeny of his own people, was why he’d been so eager to leave when Saskia Ryder asked Evfra for aid. 

Yes, he wanted to help his people, and see the safe return of his beloved Moshae, no matter Evfra’s claim that she was lost—but there was something in him that longed for that thrill of the unknown, to _prove_ himself, even after the chaos and tragedy of his life. 

Something foolish, and better left unexamined, he thought in his darker moments, when the unfamiliar claustrophobia threatened to consume him. He longed for adventure, yes, but so too did he long for his family, for his fellow warriors on Voeld, who fought the Kett bravely and died to protect them all. Sometimes he wondered if it was selfish to leave them, even if what he did might end their conflict once and for all, if these aliens proved worthy of his trust.

He wondered what the Moshae would say. That he should lean into his new life, learn as much as he could about the strangeness in the people around him, his new… _friends_? He thought she would. To think otherwise would run too close to Akksul’s philosophy of isolation and fear. 

Compassion, generosity, and trust. These were the things that must form the foundation for his new life, if the Angara were to live in peace with their new neighbors. 

It took him a few weeks to work up the courage, but almost a month into his sojourn with his new companions, he thought he was doing quite well for himself. 

He had bonded with Liam, a rugged, charismatic human who seemed eager to learn as much as he could about the Angara and was equally as frustrated with the idea that unnecessary barriers existed between their people. Though he did not understand half of what the man said, Jaal sensed nothing but passion, and an intense desire to prove himself worthy of the task laid at his feet. A desire he recognized, and shared. 

Cora, too, was proving to be a diverting woman to get to know. Brave, and firm, and deeply philosophical in her views on morality and the art of war. They had shared a few conversations on the Kett and what the Angara were doing to combat them, and her found her point of view refreshingly blunt, yet compassionate. 

The rest of the team was equally as fascinating—Vetra and her hard, rugged inclination to protect and nurture, Drack with his ancient yet nuanced disregard for danger, Peebee with her manic thirst for knowledge and experience that, apparently, included learning as much as she could of him. 

The rest of the Tempest’s crew seemed just as committed, just as interested in proving themselves worthy of the task they’d set for themselves. All of them made some amount of sense to him. Their goals and motivations, if not entirely within his realm of understanding, were at least _apparent_. 

The same was not true of the woman at the center of them all. 

Saskia Ryder was, by all accounts, a mystery. At times silent and unfeeling, he thought her nothing more than a cold shell of a woman, moving from task to task with robotic efficiency, if somewhat fumbling hands. She was direct, when she deigned to speak, and the only emotion that she seemed to experience was frustration, her only expressions that of wide-eyed patience or a slight frown. She was cut from living ice, like the strange sculptures on Voeld formed from cutting winds and the erosion time—as unfamiliar and strange as the stars themselves. 

And then… 

And then there were times when she seemed to glisten behind her strange silver eyes, a rolling, vast wealth of _something_ hiding just under her pale, mask-like face. 

Something like grief, perhaps? Or hope? He did not know. A slight smile, a laugh so faint he could half-convince himself he’d imagined it, trying to see emotion in a clouded glass. Only once had he seen a gesture of her weakness, that frozen moment after she had saved the scientists on Havarl, folded over a Remnant console and clutching it as if she had let her strength fail for one, brief second. 

He had originally thought that humans were simply emotionless beings, prone to empty violence and vice, if rumors of the new port on Kadara were to be believed. 

But it was not so. Liam, Cora, Suvi, and Gil all seemed to exhibit feeling as he knew it, if it took him a while to understand their cues, their particular ways of being. 

Only this Pathfinder seemed hewn from crystal. 

And so, like the childhood recklessness from which he’d never truly grown out of, he’d asked her to share his workspace. 

It took her three days to return, so long he thought she might have reconsidered and written him off as… _nosy_ , in Vetra’s endearing assessment. 

And then one day, a soft _rap rap_ on the door, and he turned to find her standing with a small box in her equally small hands, face unreadable except for the intensity in her eyes. A determination he’d seen when she approached the Remnant structures. 

They exchanged a few pleasantries, and he hoped they were of the proper deference and courtesy—aliens, it seemed, were liable to scare if one extended too much in the way of excitement or joy. They were odd things, beings who had crossed darkspace to arrive in a new land and yet so frightened of offense they prefered not to speak at all. He wondered how any of them had developed alliances in their own galaxy in the first place. 

Saskia Ryder took up a spot on the far wall, seeming to put as much space between them as possible, and curled over her work. He asked her a few questions, to which she gave cursory responses, but she did not lapse into long-winded explanations. Indeed those were the only times he saw anything familiar in her expression. 

In those few moments where she seemed to relax and her mind grew quick and clever, she seemed like anyone else—a bit stiff, perhaps, but bright. Alive.

On the whole, their first tense hour spent working together seemed to him a complete disaster. Later that night, when the silence became so deafening his heart threatened to burst simply to fill the void, he sought out Liam. The man invited him to watch some vid detailing the rather horrid account of a ship marooned in the middle of nowhere, where a woman had to battle against a parasitic creature attempting to kill her and her entire crew.

“What do you know of Ryder?” he asked, after failing to understand Liam’s explanation of how, exactly, the vid qualified as entertainment. His mind still lingered in the tech lab, on the petite curve of her body over unspooled wire and the soft beeping of electrical instruments. 

Liam frowned. “What do you mean?”

“She is your Pathfinder. I would like to know more of what makes her worthy of the title in your eyes.”

He let out a long breath, looking distinctly uncomfortable. “Oh… well, I mean—she’s got SAM. That’s the bare bones of it. But, I don’t know. She’s wicked smart, and even understands that Remnant stuff better than Peebee.” Liam shot him a dark look. “You did not hear me say that.”

Jaal frowned in confusion. “I heard you quite clearly.”

Liam laughed, shaking his head. “No, I mean—don’t tell her I said that. Peebee’s not exactly the type to share the spotlight, if you know what I mean.”

“Oh.” Again, he marveled at the apparent inability of everyone from the Milky Way to share an honest thought. _Such delicate aliens_. “I see.”

Liam sighed, leaning back into his seat, what he called a couch, and folded his arms behind his head. “I don’t know. It was her dad’s call to make Saskia Pathfinder, right? Not really my place to have an opinion one way or the other. My job’s to keep her and the rest of us sorry asshole’s alive.” His face fell, a deep, mournful scowl twisting his mouth. “Man, though, I don’t know how I’d be doing after getting the job like she did. That’s a fucked up situation.”

“Is it?” Jaal asked, struck by the sympathy in his eyes.

He knew little about what trials the crew of the Tempest had undergone before arriving on Aya. Their greeting to his galaxy had been to destruction by the Scourge, and the chaos of the Kett. 

Liam met his gaze. “Oh, shit, you don’t know, do you?”

“Apparently not,” Jaal said, brow raising in a question. 

“Saskia only got the job when her dad died. He was supposed to be our Pathfinder. Right after they opened up that first vault on Habitat-7, she and her dad got blown off a cliff. She nearly died. I mean, apparently she _did_ die, but she might have stayed dead if her dad hadn’t taken off his own damn helmet to give her a few more minutes of clean air, to let SAM do his thing.” Liam shook himself, as if warding off the horror of the situation. “And it wasn’t even her who was supposed to level up. Cora’d been training under the old man. It’s just… yeah, I’m sure she’s freaking out. Plus with Lukas, her brother,” he added, “down for the count with no word whether he comes back from that bitch of a coma… I’d give her the benefit of the doubt, is all.”

Jaal stared, for a moment lost for words. Inside his chest he felt a small shattering, a mournful, echoing memory of loss—when he had lost his own father to the Kett. 

“Her father sacrificed himself to save her?” he asked, sadness rimming his voice. “I… did not know.”

“Yeah, right?” Liam frowned, deeply troubled. “And I keep thinking she needs somebody to talk to about it, right? I mean, maybe Lexi’s on it, but I gotta think…” He closed his eyes, a weariness falling over his shoulders. “I don’t know. Some people process grief in different ways. Maybe she doesn’t want anybody’s help. Wouldn’t know. Girl’s wound so tight, I wouldn’t know if she’d been hurt unless I saw the blood myself. That’s happened a few times, actually. Tough as nails, even if she’s kind of skittish.”

“And that is normal?” Jaal asked, unable to understand. 

How could anyone come to live with that kind of grief alone? He had barely survived the death of his father, and he’d had his entire family for comfort. To undergo that without any support…

Liam shrugged. “Sometimes. People are weird, right?”

“If that is your definition of _weird_ , perhaps we are more different than I had initially thought.”

Liam stared at him, unease creasing his brow. “Look, I get that you Angara are free-wheeling with your feelings, and that’s great. But you can’t expect everyone else to be.”

“Have you thought that she might be hurting alone for no reason?” he asked, rising to his feet, suddenly needing to move. _How_ could these people dismiss her so easily? “Have any of you asked her, or are you all content to let each other waste away in silence?”

It made sense, to think her hardened from grief or anger. Though he had never seen it in his own life, _this_ he could comprehend. It gave her silence, her stoicism, more meaning and weight. It made her awkward attempts at conversation the product of calcified fear rather than an inability to connect or a lack of soul. He could _work_ with this.

Liam’s face was hard, with understanding, not anger. “You can’t just force someone to talk about shit like this. She might still be living it. And then again she might not care. You can’t know that, man. Unless you can read minds, it might do more harm than good.” He voice softened as he got to his feet, giving Jaal a pat on the shoulder. “I know where you’re coming from, trust me. And it’s your call, in the end, but I’d give her some space. Let her open up in her own time. We’re all in over our heads, trying to figure this out as we go. But, yeah. I feel you.”

Jaal threw out his hands, trying to release his frustration. He did not agree, though he understood, somewhat, what Liam meant. Humans were strange, ridiculous creatures who kept to themselves and would rather have their grief eat them from the inside out, apparently, than attempt to speak about it. 

Later, when he was stretched out on his cot and staring up at the ceiling of his room, he remembered the one time he had expressed any sympathy for her. A passing thought, a normal reaction to hearing her recount a piece of her history. He had thought it nothing more than courtesy at the time. 

She had frozen again, retreated behind her silver eyes, as disinterested with his attempt to connect as everything else that lived and breathed, pumped blood and _felt_. He had thought her more like her ship than her crew, at that moment, drifting through space in an unfeeling shell of metal and electricity. 

Perhaps Liam friend was right, that she would not react well to any of his attempts to understand her. 

And why should he? He was here to find his Moshae, to help his people. Even if he wanted to understand, it was not necessary. Even if it might help him rest easier thinking the woman upon whom he had rested his hopes was _not_ an unfeeling shell, he was more than capable of handling any situation that might arise if she were. The rest of the crew seemed moral, and true. They would not follow someone who did not take their safety into account, no matter her emotional investment.

No, whatever Saskia Ryder was, she had accepted his offer of friendship, however reluctantly, and that must be enough. He could spin theories over her internal motivations, or he could take her at face value, and react. That was all he could do, in the end. They would arrive at Voeld soon. He would save the Moshae, and return to his people. Everything between then and now, no matter how difficult or strange, was a necessary burden. One he would accept without reservation. 

_A foolish, reckless boy indeed to think I could sprout wings and learn to fly in the same breath_ , he thought, turning over and trying, again, to banish the silver from his eyes.


	6. Through a Prism, Shining

The first lesson set to Jaal by the Moshae, fresh from the fire of his father’s loss and eager, ready to fight the monsters that had ripped apart his life, was to study the behavior of a small creature that lived near the Forge.

The meshni was a curious animal, scaled and spiked, with a collar of raised skin and eyes that took up half its face. By all biological standards, it should have been a fearsome creature, with fangs that curled past its lower lip and a slender frame that allowed it to crawl undetected through the ferns and cracks of the heat-pocked earth, lightning fast and silent as death. Its poison was said to stop a heart in less than a second, and no antidote existed except from the venom itself, which no one could extract because no one could catch the meshni. A ghost among the ferns and bioluminescent trees of Havarl that plagued children’s fears and soldiers’ superstitions.

But the accounts of its killing anyone were rare indeed. It was a solitary creature, that apparently subsisted off the hydrothermal vents that expelled mineral gas from Havarl’s core and fed the glittering streams of water that circled the Forge. It did not hunt, or fight, or seem interested in anything other than sitting by these vents and lazily absorbing what nutrients it could from the streams of gas.

Jaal had stalked the creature for hours, only to have it slip away without a trace, not to be seen again for another week. It drove him mad, not only because it was an inane task, one more suited to scientists than warriors, as he had told the Moshae again and again. There was no way to study it, for no one could catch the damn thing. He started to believe it was an impossible test, one perhaps designed to test the boundaries of his patience.

It was three months into his studies, and he was well on his way to quitting in a fit of frustration, that he stormed off one night after a fight with the Moshae, to cry alone on the mountainside. When he had emptied himself of tears and anger, filled with a growing realization that he was, perhaps, not suited to this life of contemplation and study, as he had so wanted to be, he watched the moon rise over the horizon and waited as night fell.

He did not know how long he sat, gazing out across the lapis valley, dotted with swathes of iridescent rose and violet, a few voices drifting up over the low-hanging clouds to reach him in his place of solitude.

On a whim, or by some unknown force beyond himself which had prodded his curiosity, he looked to the side, and froze. For there, on a ledge only ten feet away, resting on a small, barely visible vent, sat the meshni.

He made no sound, no movement, sure that he would scare the creature away, or provoke it into fulfilling its fearsome reputation. For a space beyond time, he watched. It blinked, staring up at the moon in a reflection of his own grief, eyes large and black like void-pools. Its ridged neck pulsed slowly with the beat of its heart, glistening indigo fangs hanging past folds of scaled skin bleached white from moonlight.

And then, as if it had known he was watching, it turned to him, gave him one long, piercing stare, and rose. It walked toward him, six legs moving slowly, languorously across the ground. His heart beat so fast it might have burst, but he was frozen in place, waiting for whatever absolution it offered.

The meshni came within a foot, stopped. And proceeded to crawl over his thighs, as if he were nothing more than a piece of rock in its way.

Jaal had not forgotten, could never forget, the moment of panic and fear, that his life would end by the fangs of a beast that had toyed with him for months. But it simply kept walking, with purpose in its slender gait, and vanished into the underbrush.

He had left the Moshae two months later, or she had kicked him out, one or the other, having learned little and gained almost nothing. Truly, the only thing he had learnt was a respect for those who knew more than he, and an understanding that sometimes, when he was out of his depth and in over his head, it was better to watch. And wait.

* * *

For three days, Jaal and the Pathfinder worked in relative silence.

In any other context, he might have found the lack of interaction deafening, a maddening, frustrating _lack_ of sound that made him tense, edgy. He had needed to teach himself patience, always one for action and reaction. Evfra had not made him lieutenant for brash ignorance, and so he had harnessed his impatience, honed his eagerness. In most circumstances, he could control this wilder part of himself with only minor difficulty, but it was harder when his emotions were high. Harder still when he had to fight against his basic instincts.

He had mulled over Liam’s advice, weighing the idea of approaching Ryder and offering his shoulder, if she needed it. Emotional therapy, he had thought to himself as a joke. From what he had seen, Lexi needed his help in this regard, and he was only too happy to listen, to help these aliens who were unable to cope with the emotional trauma this mission put on them.

But he had remained quiet, moved by a distant memory and urge to stillness. And slowly, he had come to understand that perhaps his new friend was correct.

For while the silence almost always hung between them in the tiny tech lab where they’d both carved out a space for serenity, it was not a silence sharp-edged and barbed. It was the pensive silence. A silence of comfort, and consideration.

And so, in his silence, he watched. And waited.

And to his immense and unexpected excitement, he was rewarded.

On the fourth day, she offered to bring him one of his sleeves of nutritional paste from the kitchen, as she was heading down for a snack. He thanked her, unable to tear his gaze from the doorway, and had to force himself not to watch her too closely for the rest of their silent time together.

On the fifth day, he noticed her fidgeting in her chair, tucking her silver hair behind her ears and curling so closely around her work that he thought she might be having trouble with her vision. He chanced a look every now and again, every time her small back hunched further, fingers either buried in her hair or between her lips.

This, he found most troubling. Was she… eating her fingers? Is that something humans did? He had to admit, he knew next to nothing about human physiology. Perhaps it was an… evolutionary trait that had allowed them to survive in relatively soft bodies without any natural armor. They could somehow sustain themselves on their own flesh?

The thought was macabre, and entirely disturbing.

She rose suddenly, springing up with surprising agility, and paced toward him, only to stop when she caught him watching.

“Jaal,” she started, eyes flat and pale cheeks flushed with red. This, too, he did not understand. He supposed it was blood rushing to her face—for increased circulation? Was she cold?

“Do you have any experience in retrofitting a hologram device?”

He blinked, smiled. “I do. Do you require my help with something?”

“If you’re not busy. Yes.” Her voice was small and devoid of inflection, but he thought she saw her fingers twitch. A side effect of the regeneration?

He was about to rise, when she walked forward. Her eyes were on the wall behind him and her movements robotic as she held out a flat surface. A tablet interface, though it was different from what he was used to.

“I’m trying to create a 3D display of the Remnant code to see if I’m missing something. But my algorithms aren’t working.”

He nodded absently, watching her out of the corner of his eye as he examined the device.

“I thought maybe an angaran eye would have better luck spotting where I went wrong.”

He frowned at that, looking up to see her eyes drifting from the tablet to his face. “Why would that help?”

“From what little I’ve seen of angaran tech, there are echoes of the Remnant in it.”

“Truly?” The thought was… strangely disquieting.

“I mean—” She hesitated, clearing her throat, a small, faint line appearing in her brow. “I don’t have much to go on, obviously, but there are some similarities. For instance, you all seem to measure from a base of three as opposed to ten. Remnant tech counts in a base of nine. All the computing’s done in trinary rather than binary, that kind of thing.”

He stared at her, feeling again like a child in the Moshae’s classroom as they discussed things beyond his understanding. “I will take your word for it.”

To his immense relief, he understood the configuration of the tablet, as it was similar to the projection he himself had created in his childhood home.

“There, that should work. Although I apologize for being unable to converse about the specifics of your research.” He chuckled. “My sister Arajh would love to pick your mind. She was always the brainy one. I, of course,” he gestured to his gun, sitting, as it always did, only a few feet from him, “am more inclined to the practical application of technology.”

She held his gaze, weighing his words, nothing at all betrayed in her lifeless mask.

With a jolt of guilt, he realized what speaking about his sister might awaken inside her, and he struggled to think of a way out of this particular topic.

And then, to his amazement, her mouth pulled up ever so slightly to the side, and a sliver of light shone through her eyes. Her crystalline voice softened, and she said, “We can’t all be perfect, I guess.”

It took him a moment to register that she was… _flirting_ with him. Or… perhaps it was simple friendliness. Though it certainly _felt_ like flirting.

His smile was quick, a deep, rolling chuckle making his shoulders shake. “I should be offended, Ryder.”

“Should you?” She turned, but not before he caught another twitch of her lips. “I thought angara were made of stronger stuff than that.”

“Strong, perhaps, but most definitely still soft,” he mused, eyes glued to the back of her head, willing her to turn around again.

His chest was alight with nerves, a giddy elation he had not felt since he was young and foolish and flirting with everything that moved. It was the thrill of success at teasing a laugh from a prospective partner, an invitation for more dancing, more courting.

It was different, of course. He did not want to court anyone, let alone Saskia Ryder, still a stranger and worse, an unknown and possibly dangerous entity, but it was something.

Something he could work with.

She sat, shot him a look over her shoulder with eyes that still glittered. Another brief, faint smile, and she said, “Thank you, Jaal.”

They lapsed into silence again, Jaal biting his tongue so as not to frighten her. But she was not some elusive creature that prowled a dark and rugged landscape. She was a woman. And she was grieving. Surely…

“Is your sister interested in the Remnant?”

He looked up, nearly dropping the miniature drive core he was updating to enhance his booster jet stability.

She was hunched over her work, but faced slightly toward him. With one leg tucked up onto her stool and the other folded in an elaborate way under her rear, he wondered how on earth she could be comfortable in such a position. But it suited her, strange as she was.

“Arajh works at a museum on Aya preserving Remnant technology. Cataloguing and researching what we can from before the Scourge.” He grinned. “It is dry and boring work, but she loves it. She has a mind suited to ancient machines and thinks in numbers, not words. You would like her.”

Her eyes flashed up to him, blinked once. He had the odd sensation she had pinned him to the wall with the force of her gaze.

“I think I should be offended.”

He laughed, and she looked down at her work, though the pursing of her lips made his heart thrill.

“I only meant that she is just as interested as you are in the Remnant. Just as eager for more knowledge. A scientist to the core, Arajh is. And prone to getting lost in old ruins.”

“I remember what that was like,” she mused, a strand of silver hair falling over her eye. She reached up to brush it away, and met his gaze. “Not much time for getting lost these days. Not on purpose, anyway.”

“No,” he murmured, “I would imagine not.”

He waited, but she did not look away, fingers going still over the tablet surface.

Bidden by an urge deep in his gut, he asked, “Is your brother equally fascinated by the ancient and unknown?”

He half-expected her to freeze and retreat, like she had so many times before. He readied himself for it, for this brief swell of connection between them to fade and disperse, and leave them in silence once more.

But her brows lifted, surprise breaking her mask, and she smiled. For only the second time since meeting her, she laughed, and the sound made all his nerves fire in joy.

“Lukas?” she asked, voice high and catching, like birdsong. “God no. He’s about as interested in ancient civilizations as I am in guns.”

She blinked a few times, a wave washing over her body as she breathed out, and shrugged, ice melting off her shoulders and making her small body vibrate with energy. All at once, she came into focus, clear and sharp, and soft—soft and _alive_.

“I took him to a Prothean site once, back—,” she stumbled, as if catching herself, and continued, “back in the Milky Way. He almost fell into a burial chamber when he wandered off on his own, nearly spoiling thirty years of research because he was bored. Almost got me fired, the asshole.” She shook her head, rolling her eyes. “He can’t sit still for longer than a second without needing something flashy to look at or a warm body to flirt with. He’s hopeless.”

The affection in her voice, the sheer wealth of devotion and love, tinged with a wellspring of fear and longing, made him want to rise and envelop her in his arms.

He did not, because neither did he know her well enough to display such comfort, nor did he think she would appreciate it.

But the veil that had been drawn back revealed a deeply emotional woman, someone who kept to herself, and did not share easily.

_Elusive, frayed… like a pebbled surface over dark water._

He had been right in his initial assessment. Though it was not dark water he glimpsed now, but moonlight, halcyon-bright. Fragile, timid, but startling in its potency.

“You miss him.”

She met his gaze, and did not speak for a long, heavy moment.

Again, he found himself pinned by those eyes—startling and rare, _uneasy_ , but profound in their depths. A prism hiding a multitude of color if one only shined a light.

 _How_ had he thought her unfeeling?

“He’s all I have,” she finally answered, voice soft and high, but steady.

The moment broke as she turned back to her work.

He opened his mouth to say… what? What could he say to something so raw, like a nerve open to the unforgiving air.

“Sorry,” she murmured, barely loud enough for him to hear.

“Do not… _apologize_ , Ryder,” he said, his voice coming out rough. He cleared his throat, attempting to return to himself after witnessing her slice of vulnerability. Perhaps it was that he had been mulling over the problem she posed for the past week, or he was not ready for the depths of her emotion—so affecting in its potency—but he found himself struggling for words. 

She looked to him again, studying, curious, wary.

“I mean to say that… if you need someone to share your feelings with, I offer myself. I understand what it is to grieve the loss of a loved one, to have it cut you open inside and remake the very core of what you were and who you thought you should be.” He paused, leaning forward, once again forcing himself not to move, to impose himself on her. To choose the path of inaction and let the universe move around him. As it moved around her.

Her lips parted, and she drew in a short, shaky breath. “I—I don’t really talk about this kind of thing. Ever,” she added, darkness crowding into her expression.

“I had noticed.”

Something in her eyes flashed bright, and then dimmed just as quickly.

“And I am not the only one.”

A hard, knowing smile tugged at her mouth. “You’ve been talking to Liam.”

“You knew his concerns, then?”

“He’s not exactly subtle.”

Jaal laughed, and nodded. “No, for all his many wonderful talents, subtlety does not rank high among them.”

He watched her closely, marveling at the subtle shift in her expression. Though her emotions still refracted under the surface, like an iceberg, what she did reveal was all the louder for its rarity.

“You should know that your strange family aboard the the Tempest cares about you, Saskia Ryder. I think they would be more than willing to carry some of your burdens.”

She stared at him, something certain forming behind her moon-bright eyes. “Are you included in this… strange family of mine?”

He didn’t know if she meant it to be sarcastic or playful, but it rang with honesty, a question left unanswered for a long time.

Was he?

He cared about these people, of course. They were odd, and at times so unfamiliar it made him feel as if _he_  had been the one to travel across darkspace to a home that bore no resemblance to his own.

But they were fierce, and flawed, and rigorously vital in a way he had not expected.

And, to his immense relief, so was she.

“I… would like to be, yes.”

She flushed, red splotches blooming across her pale skin like pigment over parchment, and he realized then that she had exhibited such behavior before. It had simply taken him this long to understand that it was not some unknowable reaction—but embarrassment, or… happiness, that enhanced the pale glimmer of her face.

“Good,” she said, simply, and looked down at her tablet again, raising the interface and fiddling with symbols he knew were Remnant, but whose meaning eluded him.

The flush held, however, as he made no effort to hide his study of her every now and again while he worked on the propulsion core in his hands, focusing on her bottom lip tucked between her teeth, her fingers pulling back her hair and tugging on her earlobe, unconsciously, it seemed.

 _Perhaps the universe is not so mysterious_ , he mused to himself, when she had finally left him with a short goodbye, punctuated by a lingering look as she walked out of the door.

Or, if it was, then maybe he was happy to let the mystery unfold before him, and watch the dance of light in its wake.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you guys so much for all the lovely messages <3


	7. Aurora Under the Ice, pt. 1

“I think my mandible is frozen,” Vetra grumbled, hunched down and sounding thoroughly disgruntled through their coms. “Remind me to bring a scarf next time we start marching through a snowstorm.”

“Turian scarves,” Liam said through chattering teeth. “That’s a laugh.”

“Because only humans can keep their necks warm?”

“All right, maybe the idea of _you_ knitting yourself a scarf is hilarious.”

“Why is making one’s clothing cause for hilarity?” Jaal asked. Of Saskia’s three companions, he was the only to sound unaffected by the cold. “Or am I misunderstanding?”

Saskia’s mouth twitched as she keyed in the final code to set up their forward station, turning to watch her little recon group huddling together for warmth around the still smoking pod. 

Liam shook his head, practically hopping up and down. “It’s more of an image than an idea, I guess. Vetra hunched over a pair of needles, snapping at rowdy kids on her lawn.”

Saskia couldn’t see through Vetra’s visor, but she imagined the dry, weary expression on the turian’s face well enough.

“Humans find other species hilarious just on principle. It comes from their whole egotistical ‘everyone else is an alien’ thing.”

“Yeah, well, if the turians hadn’t shot first at Shanxi, maybe we wouldn’t need to work so hard at it.”

“What is _Shanxi_?” Jaal asked, chewing the word and tilting his head. 

“A bundle of laughs, obviously,” Liam said with a snort, dancing away as Vetra tried to hit him in the back of the head. “Watch it. I’m about two seconds from freezing my nipples off, here.”

“And how tragic that would be for all the times you walk around without your shirt on,” Vetra deadpanned.

“I think it’s kind of nice,” Saskia said mildly.

All three of them stilled, and turned to her, as if they’d forgotten she was there.

“I’m sorry, Ryder, I must have misheard you,” Vetra said without inflection. “Did you just call Voeld, the freezing hell-scape of subzero ice and horizontal sheets of snow, _kind of nice_?”

Saskia’s cheeks warmed under her helmet, but she shrugged, and forced herself to say, “It’s not so bad. We had winters like this in Minnesota. Just keep moving and try not to think about it.”

Again, they all stared at her, as if the very idea was incomprehensible. 

Liam’s choked laugh broke the silence as he pulled her into a one-armed hug. 

She tensed, but let him hold her as he laughed, “You’re fucking mental, Pathfinder.”

“What is _Minnesota_?” Jaal asked, with increasing frustration. 

She extricated herself from Liam, happy she had her helmet on to hide her awkward expression. The past few weeks had been nice, if wildly uncomfortable. Ever since her talk with Jaal, she’d realized how she must come across the rest of the crew—cold, unfeeling, even mean. 

Liam’s surprise when she visited him a few times without prompting was evidence enough. He’d been happy, she guessed, which was nice, and he hadn’t pushed her too much. It’d been… weird, just to talk about normal things, like his childhood and job, her studies, why they’d both come to Andromeda in the first place. 

It felt… comfortable, which was odd in and of itself, but she was trying. 

Like her brother’s ghost was hovering over her shoulder, urging her to _live a little, Saskia, jeez_ —

She killed the thought before it could complete itself. Lukas wasn’t dead. And he wasn’t dying. He could give her as much shit as he liked when he woke up. Until then, she’d have to do it herself. 

“We should get to the monolith before sundown,” she said, turning away from Liam’s attempt to explain to Jaal what Shanxi and Minnesota were. Frowning, she peered over her shoulder, trying to gauge the timing. “SAM?”

“You have five hours until true sunset, Pathfinder, when temperatures will drop below acceptable safety thresholds.”

“Good to know this is acceptable, SAM,” Liam muttered, rolling out his shoulders as he made to board the Nomad after Saskia. “I don’t think I want to know what an AI’s level of _acceptable_ is when it comes to freezing my balls off.”

“By balls, do you mean testicles?” Jaal asked, making Vetra choke and turn away. 

“Yes, I do, big guy,” Liam said, sounding thoroughly pleased and patting Jaal on the shoulder. 

“I can call in an evac for you, Liam,” Saskia said, trying hard to keep her voice level, “if you’re that delicate.”

Jaal’s laughter nearly deafened her ears for a moment, and even Vetra snickered. 

“They’re already busted, thanks though.” Liam settling beside her in the passenger seat of the Nomad, shooting her a playful frown. 

“I like this side of you, Ryder,” Vetra mused. “You should bust Kosta’s balls more often.”

Saskia kept her gaze forward, trying not to get too nervous about driving the Nomad. She’d gotten better since Eos, mostly because she didn’t want to experience Gil trying to control his meltdown when she brought ‘his baby’ back with dents, a broken axle, and a compressor malfunction that had taken two weeks for him to fix on the Tempest. 

Her mind wandered as she drove, slowly, carefully, through ravines covered in snow and ice so thick it almost reached her window. Voeld was an unforgiving place, frozen, hostile, and utterly dangerous, but she was starting to see the beauty in its ferocity. The ice spires in the distance, the harsh cut of the landscape as they crawled along the edge of a cliff. And every once in a while, a slice of deep navy sky dotted with bright pinpricks of stars. 

This place might have once been breathtaking, might be again. If she could get the vault working. 

They snaked through a small cleft in a deep rock-face covered by towers of twisted, pale stone, fingers reaching up from the depths of a dead planet to grasp at a long-obscured sky. They had to disembark halfway through, as she didn’t trust herself navigating the close corners. She really should just let someone else drive, but Gil had been rather… insistent about her figuring it out. As if his beloved Nomad was meant for the Pathfinder alone to drive. His bad luck that the Pathfinder was a skittish mess. She was used to old, beat-up trucks, not state of the art all-terrain vehicles that jumped every time she looked at the controls funny. 

The ravine opened up into a cave of roughly-hewn ice, gouged out of the earth around spikes of smooth black stone, as if a hand had cleared the space thousands of years ago. The howl of the wind above and the soft, insistent beeping of her hard-suit telling her the air wasn’t safe for exposure vanished the second she entered the little pocket surrounding the Remnant console. 

She studied the area, remembering the same zone of clarity around the monoliths on Eos, where the poisoned air and heat had softened inexplicably in a thirty-meter diameter.

Without waiting for the rest of her group to catch up, she clambered up onto the central platform and released her helmet. Cold, fresh air filtered past her face, and she breathed deep. 

“Ryder, hey,” Vetra started, jogging forward in alarm, “what are you—”

“It’s fine,” Saskia called, holding out her helmet with a small smile. “Look.” She pointed to a barely-visible circular ring that stretched across the ground just behind Vetra. Closer to the monolith, the cave floor was smooth, untouched by the same weathering and rot that littered the entrance beyond, a slight, subtle variation in color, brighter, more vibrant inside the circle. 

“I noticed this on Eos too,” she continued, setting her helmet down and shaking out her hair. Her breath ghosted in front of her face, but the temperature was only a bit cold, like a fresh winter’s day. “I think whatever technology is responsible for the terraforming network guards these consoles too. Even if the planet goes south, these nodes are protected so they can be accessed.” 

Jaal stepped forward, releasing his helmet and visor. He hesitated for a moment, as if waiting for her theory to be proven wrong, before he smiled. “Extraordinary. If only the kett were not interested in Remnant technology, these monoliths might make for strategic Resistance camps sheltered from the harsh weather.”

“Theoretically, that shouldn’t be an issue if we can reset the planet,” she murmured, watching him gaze around the cave, the pulsing light of the electric blue ice casting his skin in a soft amethyst glow. “It will be a lot easier for the Resistance to… ah, _resist_ , if they’re not hindered by the storms.”

He looked at her, gave her a wide, hopeful smile. “This is true.”

Saskia turned, hiding her blush as she walked to the center console. Liam and Vetra joined them, more enthusiastically once they realized that it was indeed warmer inside the circle of the console’s influence. 

She peeled off her gloves, raising her omni-tool interface so she could call up the program she’d developed with Jaal’s help. 

She tried not to remember the last week of them working together, the way he kept watching her, without any attempt to hide his interest, as if he were waiting for her to do something flashy, or disappear. It wasn’t uncomfortable, exactly, even though she’d thought long and hard about opening up to him about Lukas, if it had been the wrong decision, or too quick for their budding friendship. He seemed willing to listen. And he was right about Liam, and a few of the others. There were people here she could rely on. It was simply a matter of working up the courage to talk to them. 

But it was hard to gauge the source of his interest, if she was just something he didn’t understand, or if it was something else. 

She _hoped_ it was something else. 

The smooth stone surface of the console was warm to the touch, a gentle, vibrating hum running up her fingers and whispering against the length of her spine. The 3D hologram lay atop the Remnant interface, and as she connected, SAM highlighting the pathways in her mind and rewiring her thought process as she settled into the code, she smiled in success as the hologram kicked to life. 

“Well, shit,” she heard Vetra murmur over her shoulder, “that’s kind of beautiful.”

“Reminds me of the art installations back at the Tate. Museum in London, on Earth,” Liam added as Jaal opened his mouth to ask, smiling absently as he watched Saskia interact with the program. 

She tilted her head, and had to admit there was something hypnotic about the flash of orange and blue light that played over the console. Her mind worked fast with its help, flipping through her database of symbols in rapid succession. It looked a bit like the light that played around a ship’s drive core, arcs of orange bleeding into white, then silver, then blue, as heat trailed in its wake. Little sparks broke and melded into geometric patterns as the symbols flipped and cycled in and out, a never-ending feed of data she had no way of understanding, removed as she was by nearly four centuries and a cultural heritage that had been lost. She could only direct it, and glimpse fragments of technology that had the power to shape entire worlds. 

It only took her a few seconds to realize that she was missing a key symbol. She took a deep breath, switching the interface off and blinking a few times as her vision blurred and she came back to herself. 

Her knees grew shaky as she stepped back, into a very solid _something_ that braced her before she could fall. 

“Thanks,” she breathed, not having to turn to see Jaal standing behind her. 

“You should be more cautious, I think,” he murmured, with a smile in his voice. “This is not the first time I have had to stop you from falling.”

She laughed, heart leaping into her throat as she managed, “And save you the trouble of catching me? Where’s the fun in that?”

His grip tightened around her arm as he chuckled, but he released her as she stepped away. 

“What happened?” Liam asked, breaking through her nerves. 

“I’m missing a symbol,” Saskia said, exhaling and letting her eyesight adjust. She still felt some vertigo, as if she’d just jumped off a fast-moving walkway. “The interface is gibberish without it.”

“Does it usually make sense?” Vetra asked, skeptical. 

“Yes, actually.” Saskia pursed her lips, taking another step back and waving Jaal off as he moved toward her. She flipped open her scanner and a network of wires and nodes of energy erupted into life under the Remnant architecture. One pulled at her mind, still echoing with that ancient language of symbol and pattern. 

“I think,” she started, gazing up at the ceiling of the cave, “that the information is housed on the surface.” She frowned. “Now, what’s the point of that?”

“Maybe to spread the information out so it wouldn’t all be in the same place?” Liam suggested.

“To hide the pattern, so that only the worthy might find it,” Jaal added.

Vetra sighed. “The designers were sadists.”

Saskia smiled absently as she turned and made for the cave exit. “I think we can scan—”

“ _Hey_ ,” Liam said, pulling her back as she tried to walk off the platform. “Safe zone? You took your helmet and gloves off. Pathfinder fingers are kind of a commodity right now, yeah?” 

“Oh, right.” Saskia cleared her throat, trying to act like she totally _hadn’t_ forgotten where she was and why she was here in the first place, to heal the planet so cold it would induce hypothermia in less than thirty seconds without any kind of hard-suit protection. 

“Liam and I will find your missing symbol,” Vetra said, sounding less than thrilled about the prospect of walking out into the cold again. “It’ll be on the side of the monolith, right?”

“Ah, should be,” Saskia said, feeling a little guilty. “It’ll be something with a curved tail and a tapered, pointed head. Kind of like a broken umbrella.”

“Mad, these Remnant guys,” Liam said with a sigh, still turned toward Saskia as if he were reluctant to leave. 

“Come on, Kosta, let’s go for a jaunt in the snow.”

“Oh, Vetra, you putting it on? I’m chuffed, really.”

“Not on your life.”

Saskia watched them go, unable to shake the feeling that she should have been the one to climb back up to the outside of the monolith. It was her job to decode Remnant tech, not theirs. 

“I think it looks like the aurora.”

She turned to Jaal, who had leaned against one of the pillars at the edge of the platform and was considering the space above the console, as if the interface was still active. 

“I like that,” she said as she walked back to the center, raising her program and letting it drift in stasis over the Remnant base. On a whim, she focused her mind, urging the symbols to rise and shift, morph into one another, and stretch. She couldn’t change the color, but she could affect the wave, setting one on top of the other in strips of flickering, static light. “Are we near one of the poles right now?”

It took Jaal a moment to answer. She looked at him, only to find his eyes unfocused and staring at her, or rather at the light show in front of her. 

“We… are about three hundred kilometers north of the southern magnetic pole, I believe.” He seemed to snap out of his trance, voice modulating a bit high, as if he were compensating for something. “Every now and then the storms will clear, and we can see the colors play across the heavens. It is a beautiful sight. The kind that makes you believe in magic.”

She nodded, letting the display drop and closing her eyes as she readjusted again. “That sounds familiar. Everything goes crystal clear and the stars are sharper than usual. We used to call it the Aurora Borealis, the Northern Lights.”

“Was this also in… _Minnesota_?” He said it slowly, sounding out each syllable as he had with the Milky Way when she first met him. “You lived there for a time?”

“We lived everywhere, for a while,” she smiled, remembering her brief stint on the Citadel before her father was discharged from the Alliance, with only Lukas for company and too much time on their hands to get into all kinds of trouble, “but yes, that’s… where we stayed while my mom and I recovered. Or, where I recovered.”

Jaal hesitated, brow creased. “From your illness. Your mother…”

“She died from the same disease.” It was a hollow sadness that echoed through her chest, not the barbed thing it used to be. 

At once, his posture softened, a great, sympathetic pain emanating from him. “I am sorry. That is… unimaginable.” His voice rang with the conviction of his words, resonating around the cave like a mournful lament. 

“Thank you,” she murmured. 

They stood in silence for a while, watching each other, waiting. She wondered if he… if _they_ were at the point where this kind of conversation was normal. She wasn’t exactly an expert at friendship, and it’s not like he was a typical conversationalist. 

Though he wasn’t too strange, not really. Not now that she’d gotten to know him better. Enthused, and direct—what had Liam called it? Plain-spoken Angaran honesty. But overwhelmingly empathetic. And warm. Comforting. All-together lovely to be around. 

_Say something_ , she urged herself as they continued to stand in silence. 

“So, have you spent a lot of time on Voeld?” she asked, picking at the first thread that came to her. “With the—”

A resounding crack echoed through the cave, and snow fell from the ceiling as a great shrieking sounded at the mouth of the ravine. The ground shook as something huge broke and smashed, sending a cloud of snow and ice into the entrance. Saskia fell forward, hitting the Remnant console with her hip and gasping in pain. 

Jaal fared slightly better, stumbling as he caught himself, and then rushing to her as she braced herself before falling entirely. 

“Ryder, are you—”

“ _Fine_ ,” she hissed through gritted teeth, though she let him prop her up as her hip spiked with pain. “I’m fine.”

“Pathfinder, I detect no extensive damage to the bone or the surrounding muscle,” SAM supplied, helpfully. “You have simply bruised your pelvis.”

“Like a peach,” she muttered. 

“What?” Jaal asked in concern. 

Saskia closed her eyes and stood on her own, groaning a little as she breathed through the pain. “Nothing. Talking to SAM.” She raised her left hand and asked, urgently, “Liam? Vetra? What was that?”

A crackle of static, and her stomach plummeted. For thirty seconds, there was nothing but silence. 

“Guys?” she cried, voice breaking slightly. 

“We’re here,” Liam’s voice came through, slightly muffled and warped, as if the sound was coming up against some kind of interference. “Shit. _Shit._ ”

“Dispense with your cursing for the moment, Kosta,” Jaal said tersely. “What _happened_?”

“A fiend got spooked and started bucking into the wall,” Vetra’s voice came in, also garbled. “It hit some kind of ice sheet and sent the whole thing down into the cavern entrance.”

“Are you both okay?” Saskia asked, heart racing in her throat. She tried not to remember the last time something had gone wrong in the field, the last time she’d been separated from her team. 

_Keep it together. They’re all right._

“Fine, Pathfinder, just shaky is all.” Liam actually laughed, though the sound was hollow through the rough channel. “I don’t know if we can dig you both out. Not without help.”

“Contact the Resistance headquarters sixty kilometers west of our nav point,” Jaal said. “This is not the first time Voeld has proved herself an unwilling ally. We have equipment for just this kind of emergency.”

“Yeah, I don’t know how soon we’ll be able to get anywhere,” Vetra said, sounding uneasy.

Saskia frowned, listening closely to the static. “Is that a storm?”

“There’s one coming in, nearly on top of us.” Liam swore again, and Jaal almost growled in frustration. “Don’t know how it snuck up on us.”

“More of your safe zone bullshit, I think, Ryder,” Vetra said. 

“You two should get into the Nomad. It will be able to support you both for up to ten hours.” Saskia took a deep breath, trying to ignore the pain throbbing now along her entire right hip. “Contact the Tempest and see if they can’t track the storm progression.”

“—about you?” Liam’s voice came in and out, under it the growing sound of howling wind. “—know how you’ll—be a while.”

“We’ll be fine in here,” Saskia said loudly, as if to shout over the sound of the storm outside. “Contact us when you can.”

More static, Vetra’s voice sounding distinctly upset, silence. And then a soft buzz as an image popped up on her omni-tool, the missing Remnant symbol. 

She breathed out a hollow laugh. “Well, this is great.”

“Are you badly hurt?”

“No, just a bruise. I’m fragile to begin with, so I’m sure there’ll be a nice purple welt tomorrow. But it’s nothing. Really.”

Jaal’s face was tense. “Are you making a reference to the color of my skin as some kind of reassurance?”

“No,” she breathed, almost smiling, brushing her hair back where it had fallen from her ponytail. “Human skin changes color sometimes.” 

A smile tugged at the edge of his mouth. “I have observed this.”

She hummed a nervous laugh, trying not to think what _that_ meant. “A bruise happens when the blood vessels under my skin are broken, allowing blood to seep up to the surface. The paler the skin, the more pronounced the color.” She gestured to herself, to her translucent, papery skin. “I ‘bruise like a peach,’ a kind of fruit that grew on Earth, which means that I show when I’ve been hurt more easily.”

His face softened for a moment, and then he blinked. “Oh. You were being literal. I see. Fascinating. I did not know humans were so soft that a minor injury could cause such trauma.”

If she wasn’t such a baby, and the pain in her hip wasn’t starting to make her face contort as she breathed through the worst of it, she might have wondered what he meant by that. 

“SAM, can you get any connection to the Tempest or the Nomad?”

“No, Pathfinder. It seems that the combination of the snow storm and the interference by the Remnant technology has hampered communications for the foreseeable future.”

She closed her eyes, sighed, and pushed herself to her feet. Only to come to the full realization that, at least for the… foreseeable future, she and Jaal were completely on their own. 

Saskia met his gaze, swallowing the bundle of nerves in her throat, and prayed to whatever god inhabited this dead planet that the storm would pass soon. 

An hour or two in the tech lab on the Tempest was one thing. Ten hours alone in an abandoned cave was tempting fate. Fate that had not, historically, been on her good side. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Ah sorry I had to split this one up guys, but it was going to be approaching ridiculous lengths if I kept going.
> 
> Thank you again for all your lovely comments <3


	8. Aurora Under the Ice, pt. 2

Once, when Saskia had just started school on her own, cast adrift from Lukas after spending their whole lives attached at the hip and feeling thoroughly alone, she had worked up the courage to attend one of those awkward freshman mixers at the start of her first semester at Columbia. Young kids, all of them eager to be out of their parents’ houses, ready to mingle and meet new people and start their lives as adults, and all of them apparently ready to drink themselves under the table to do it. 

Courage aided by Lukas’ threat, of course, that he would drop out of Alliance training and frog-march her to a party himself. He would require pictures by midnight, or he was on the first flight to New York, no arguments. He’d done more for less of a reason, and somewhere, deep down, she’d agreed with him. She’d spent the past two years doing nothing but sitting or shuffling through a nearly empty house like a ghost, taking apart every electronic object she could find while her body healed. 

But she hadn’t done much socializing during her convalescence. Not that she’d wanted to, obviously. She’d never particularly _wanted_ to meet new people. But now that she was up on her feet and healthy enough to attend school without her nursemaid of a twin hovering over her shoulder, she’d thought she should try. 

That first night of college, in an unfamiliar dormitory on her own, surrounded by happy, chatty people drinking from stupid red cups and talking about things she couldn’t even begin to understand, as if they were speaking an entirely different language based on a shared cultural knowledge that was alien to her, was one of the worst nights of her life. 

Third, to be exact, after the night she’d awoken to find her dad draped over her mom’s unresponsive body, and the night of the accident on Jump Zero. 

Before leaving for Andromeda, she’d recalled that party over and over, wondering if there hadn’t been something horribly wrong with her, if the disease hadn’t warped her understanding of social cues or interpersonal interaction. 

But it had just been all-natural anxiety, something she’d forgotten she suffered from after the years it was eclipsed by her illness. Just anxiety that had that made her hands sweat and her heart jump into her throat, made her seek out a bathroom to get out of the swarm of buzzing voices and smell of alcohol, fingers fumbling for Lukas’ number before freezing and wondering if maybe calling him was childish and pathetic. 

But she did, of course. Because they didn’t lie to each other, and she wasn’t about to start at a stupid freshman mixer. He’d been three seconds from ditching his Alliance training until she swore that if he quit then, she wouldn’t leave her dorm for the next four years. 

Since arriving in Andromeda and having her life crumble into dust, she’d thought about that night a few times. That paralysis, and terror, that something so mundane as talking to people she didn’t know could send her scrambling for the nearest refuge she could find. 

She was a galaxy away from that person, and those fears, she often wondered if she’d changed. She’d witnessed new stars and fought for her life more times than she could count. She’d become aware of a vast, ancient intelligence beyond her understanding, and even been the agent of an entire planet’s rehabilitation. 

Standing in a cave, alone except for a man who was alien to her in every sense of the word, Saskia remembered that fear like a brand against her chest. 

Except Jaal wasn’t a bunch of faceless peers, talking about things she couldn’t understand. He was kind, and gentle, and boisterous, and sometimes adorably obtuse. He wasn’t entirely alien in the important ways—and yet she still felt like her heart was about to explode out of her chest. 

“I should activate the monolith,” she said, voice echoing around the now enclosed space, sounding like a frail, recorded imitation of what it should be. 

“Liam and Vetra will be fine,” Jaal murmured, face scrunching in concern. “Although, I would not put it past Vetra to lock him out of the Nomad for an errant statement.”

He thought she was worried about her friends. She was, more than she should be, probably, but that wasn’t the fear that was currently making it hard for her to look him in the eye. 

_Why_ was she freaking out?

_“I detect increased levels of activity in your amygdala, Saskia. Are you experiencing anxiety?”_ SAM asked through their private channel.

She laughed, and closed her eyes. At least she would never again wonder if her fears were imagined, with an AI to record her every reaction. 

“Ryder?” Jaal asked, voice low, as he walked toward her. 

“SAM just asked me something.” She forced herself to turn around, to meet his gaze. “I’m fine. I’m _fine_ ,” she repeated, this time to SAM, as she settled at the console. “I have anxiety.” Hesitating, she added, “I’m not exactly built for this kind of life, if you haven’t noticed.”

She keyed in the final symbol and returned to the Remnant console, letting the interface rise and her mind thread into its pattern. It took her longer than usual to fall into a rhythm, but when she did, the tightness in her chest released and her heart slowed a fraction. It wasn’t much, but the moment of panic had gone. She didn’t know if angarans had panic attacks, if Jaal would think she was going insane, or her body was failing. 

When she came out of the console, feeling the monolith shudder to life under her feet, revving like the yawn of a great, slumbering giant, she found Jaal watching her closely. 

“You said you… _have_ anxiety. How can one own an emotion?”

She blinked, took a deep breath, and considered. “Humans sometimes experience emotions when they shouldn’t. Our brains’ chemicals react when there’s no external stimulus. Or we overproduce some chemicals, underproduce others. When it happens enough, we start treating it like an illness.” 

She swallowed, trying not to get offended by the look of growing horror on his face. “I have, what we used to call back on Earth, an Anxiety Disorder. It means my brain sometimes likes to freak out when there’s no rational reason for it.” 

It took him a while, but he finally said, “Does this happen to you often?”

“Um,” she almost smiled, chest still buzzing with gentle static, “well, I got diagnosed when I was young, but it’s been happening more since coming here.”

“But you have had reason to… _freak out_ , no? You are fighting a war. You have witnessed death. Do you not see these as reasons to be afraid? To experience the harshness of loss, and pain? I think anyone in your position would… _freak out_ , from time to time.”

“No, I get that.” She leaned back against the console, trying to think of a way to explain that he might understand. “What I mean is that I’m more _likely_ to feel anxiety, and be crippled by it. Sometimes there are reasons, like right now, as we are currently trapped under a few tons of ice and rock without more than a day or two of supplies. But other times…”

God, this was horrible. It was hard enough to explain these things to other humans who didn’t suffer from mental illness. How could another species who experienced emotions in a fundamentally different way understand that sometimes her brain stopped working correctly?

“Other times I can’t control when I feel anxious. It just happens. For no reason. I could be having a perfectly normal conversation and just start to feel panic. Sometimes there are triggers, like memories or certain thoughts, but sometimes there aren’t.”

The stark confusion on his face hardened into something closer to anger, though it wasn’t biting, or directed at her. “Is this how all humans think of their emotions, or just you?”

“I wouldn’t know how all humans think of anything,” she said, watching him in fascination. 

He was clearly trying to understand, but the very idea seemed to upset him. 

He tilted his head in frustration, a crease appearing in his brow. “Obviously.”

Her brow lifted at the snappish response. “Fine, then it’s just how I think of them. Is that more acceptable?” 

Maybe it was the faint anxiety still running through her mind, or the fear that she would have nowhere to go if she _did_ begin to feel that gut-deep, wrenching need for privacy before this night was over, but she wasn’t particularly interested in his apparent judgement of something she’d struggled with her entire life. It was an odd feeling, one she didn’t often indulge, but it was hard to shake.

Silence, as he considered her. Interest flashed across his anger, followed by a new wariness. “I have offended you.”

“Yes,” she said without thought, “you have.”

He blinked, and a deep, sharp laugh burst from his lips. 

“You think that’s funny?”

His laughter curbed, and he cleared his throat, appropriately contrite. “Your reaction? Yes. The knowledge that I have offended you? No.” A smile tugged at the edge of his mouth, as if he were trying only a little to hide his amusement. “Would you indulge me another question, or have we exhausted our friendship of patience already?”

She had to purse her lips against her own smile. “Only if I get to ask one of my own.”

His smile grew again, excited determination in his eyes as he nodded. “A fair exchange. Of course.” He lifted his gun over his head, shrugging out of the external armor he’d donned to weather Voeld’s harsh climate, setting both down next to a wall at the edge of the platform. Leaning back in a mirror of her own posture, he crossed his arms over his chest, and met her gaze. 

“Go ahead,” she prompted when, after nearly thirty seconds of him staring at her as if she were a particularly difficult puzzle, he still hadn’t said anything. 

His laugh was deep, a rumbling that spread through his chest. “And here I thought you were a patient woman.”

She made no response, which only seemed to encourage him.

He considered her, and said, “This idea that emotions are to be controlled, as if they are merely constructs, ephemeral fallacies your mind conjures on accident—I find it troubling.”

She waited. 

“For my people, emotions are the same as blood and flesh—fundamental parts of a whole. What is a person without the feelings he experiences when his first love dies? Or when she sees a sunset for the first, or last, time? Remove emotion, and we are just husks, a shell, an imitation of life.”

“I still don’t hear a question,” she murmured.

He exhaled, eyes roving over her face in hungry curiosity. “This urge to control your emotions, does it not remove the joy of being alive, of simply existing?”

She exhaled sharply, and said, “Wow.” She knew he hadn’t meant it to sound so harsh, but the implication that she did not feel joy was rather… well, rude.

Is that… what he thought of her?

“It’s not that I don’t want to _feel_ anything, Jaal,” she said, sliding up onto the interface absently, folding her legs under one another, as if by sitting she might feel more steady in her argument. “It’s that sometimes the feeling is too much simply to exist.”

“But what is existence without feeling?”

“Have you ever been paralyzed by thought? Literally frozen in place by a fear that your life is about to end because you can’t get out of a room of people?” She took a deep breath, and continued, “That’s what it feels like, sometimes. That if I can’t be alone, I will die. It’s not rational, but it happens.” 

The cave was silent as he considered her, all good humor gone from his expression. 

“Do the Angara have a concept of depression?” she asked, trying a different take.

“The feeling of being depressed?” He frowned. “Of course.”

“No, I mean something more along the lines of an illness, or condition.”

Deep unease flashed in his eyes, and he shook his head. “Sadness is not an illness.”

“It can be for humans. And probably other species, but I don’t know for sure.” 

She wrapped her arms around her knees, watching him, wondering if it were even possible for him to understand. With angaran physiology, their brains might not produce chemical reactions in the same way. Maybe they didn’t suffer from mental illness, if their entire beings were designed around feeling emotion, rather than emotion being a byproduct of shoddy evolution. It would make sense as to why their feelings were so pronounced, so integral to their beings. 

“When the human brain fails to produce a certain amount of a chemical called serotonin, it can lead to symptoms like listlessness, lack of appetite, fatigue, even suicidal thoughts. And it’s not just every once in a while. It can happen for months, years, constantly, every day. It becomes a state of being, rather than a momentary struggle. Can you not see how someone would want to control that, maybe stop feeling that way?”

“Of course I can,” he said, voice soft with sympathy and… something darker she couldn’t identify. “But to remove the feeling of sadness would be to remove the feeling of joy. Life and death, desire and disgust—there must be balance. Anger comes with contentment, as does fear and loss with celebration.”

He breathed deep, that furrowed line still present in his brow, as if it were causing him pain to understand. “If your emotions are simply chemical reactions that can be tweaked and harnessed, how does your soul understand life?”

Her eyes drifted to the wall behind him, tracing the lines of the Remnant symbols along the base of the monolith, remembering the feeling of certainty, of wonder, settling into her bones as she connected with the consoles. If there was some biological impulse fueling her sensations in those moments, she couldn’t name it.

“I don’t know.” She looked back at him, wondering if he thought her cold, or callous. “But I do know that your question assumes the existence of a soul.”

That seemed to resonate with him, and his face relaxed. “I suppose it does.”

She lapsed into thought. It was a nice idea, that to have the good one must also take the bad. It was clean, simple, even if the application was anything but. It relied on an inherent faith that universe _could_ find balance, that it wasn’t some unfeeling collection of particles vibrating and colliding and melding in random sequence. 

“You turn.”

She looked up, to find him watching her with bright eyes. 

“Oh—how big is your family?” It wasn’t a conscious thought, or even something she’d wondered, really. She assumed it was large, from the way he talked about them, and his apparent discomfort with isolation. 

“My family?” he asked, thoroughly surprised. 

She nodded, smiling at his blank, open expression. 

It took him a moment to catch his bearings, but then he said, “I have eight brothers and sisters, about four times that many cousins, and three mothers, one of which is my true mother.” 

Her lips parted in surprise. She didn’t even have that many in her extended family, or hadn’t, back in the Milky Way. “And you all live in the same house?”

“Not anymore,” he said, grinning, “Some of us have taken up occupations, most in the Resistance.”

“Or in museums,” she added, to his apparent delight. 

“Yes. Arajh took a chance in not entering the Resistance, but it has paid off. She’s made more of a name for herself outside the family influence.” His voice brimmed with pride, and he chuckled. “But she was always a rebel.”

“Family influence?”

“Ah,” his smiled dimmed, and he practically fidgeted where he was leaning against the low wall of the center console. “Yes. The Ama Darav’s are… somewhat influential in Angaran society. The name carries weight.”

“Really?” 

Something about his demeanor shifted, a guilt, or awkwardness settling at the corner of his mouth, the slight tilt of his shoulders. 

Was he nervous?

“Let’s just say that I received many opinions about what I should focus my energies on while I grew up. It was… hard to know where I stood, to find a place of my own.”

“Is that why you joined the Resistance, to make a place of your own?”

“No,” his smile was rueful, “joining the Resistance was expected of me. And I wanted to, of course, but I am not like my sister. None of them, really.”

“And was it expected of you to join… me?” she asked, a realization growing at the back of her mind. 

His gaze was steady, a decision forming behind his eyes that seemed drawn up from the depths of his conviction. “No. It was not. That is, perhaps, why I did it.”

She exhaled, her breath ghosting through the air. 

So it wasn’t just an altruistic show, joining the aliens who might be able to help his people, or a cautious step to watch potential invaders. 

It was personal. 

Somehow, that made her feel all the more responsible for their success, as if she wasn’t already thinking all of this had fallen to her. 

“I see,” she murmured. She continued, if only to distract herself, “What do you mean, _true_ mother?”

“It is my turn to ask a question, I think,” he said slowly, a teasing gleam in his eyes. 

She exhaled a laugh, and inclined her head. 

“Your eyes and hair, are they a normal human trait, or have you artificially changed them?”

“No, I haven’t,” she grinned, thinking of Lukas’ inability to dye his own hair. “I lost the pigment in my hair and eyes when I recovered from Kyte’s Syndrome. The disease I contracted when I was sixteen,” she added, when his face went blank. 

“Ah,” he said, clipped, uncomfortable. “I’m sorry for asking.”

“It’s okay,” she said. “I don’t mind.”

He studied her face, frowning. “You don’t, do you?” At her lifted brow, he continued, “Illness for my people is a… private affair. Not something shared in casual conversation.”

Suddenly it made more sense to her why he’d be so uncomfortable with the idea of equating emotion and illness. 

“I suppose it can be for some humans, too. I mean,” she shrugged, “it can be for me, sometimes.”

“Not now?”

“I… guess not,” she said slowly, surprised by the truth in her words. She didn’t feel uncomfortable. 

Actually, now that she thought about it, most of her anxiety had faded. She was still keyed-up, and probably would have a hard time sleeping, whenever they were able to dig their way out of this cave, though it was more likely they’d need to sleep here for the night, which would make falling asleep even more difficult. 

“Probably because you’re not trying to diagnose me or prescribe any solutions,” she continued, breezing over the oddity that in the time they’d spent talking, she’d calmed down without realizing it. 

That had only ever worked with Lukas. 

“You seem to get along fine with Lexi,” he said. Apparently his interest had eclipsed his discomfort, because he was watching her closely. 

“I… do. When she isn’t encouraging me to use my biotics.” 

“Biotics?” His eyes widened, flashing over her body as if she’d suddenly sprouted a mass effect field. “I didn’t know you shared the same talents as Peebee and Cora.”

“I don’t. Really.” Her fingers tightened over her knees. “I might have, once, but not anymore. Another side-effect of Kyte’s Syndrome.” She watched his eyes tighten again. “We can talk about something else, Jaal. It’s not—”

“I asked, Ryder,” he said gently. “If you are uncomfortable, of course I will not insist, but don’t censor yourself for my benefit.”

She chewed on the inside of her lip as she wondered if she shouldn’t just change the subject. Explanations usually led to people treating her like a fragile glass ornament, and while she didn’t mind, exactly, it didn’t make her feel cozy.

“Do you know how biotics work?”

“A bit. Peebee’s explanation was… rather spare.”

“I’ll bet,” she mused. “It’s different for asari, who have the ability at birth. In humans and most other species, when babies are exposed to element zero, they have a chance of developing nodules in their brain that can allow them to direct dark energy, to create mass effect fields to affect gravity, heat, light, even sometimes molecular energy at a very small scale. Mostly it’s what Cora does, manipulating different kinds of barriers to increase her strength and resiliance. They also helped us travel around the Milky Way with the relays I told you about.”

He nodded, listening intently.

She took a deep breath, keeping her voice steady as she continued, “When I was sixteen, my mom and I were visiting a station called Jump Zero, one of the first places human biotics were being tested. A terrorist group happened to arrive while we were there, and tried to steal information the base was conducting on their younger recruits.” She swallowed, recalling the fear of crouching behind a wall of containers with her mom, waiting for the fight to end, hearing the sharp crack of gunfire and distant screams. 

“Something happened, and a container of element zero was hit with a projectile that caused the compound to grow unstable, filling a small area with a highly-charged particle cloud. Element zero is dangerous over time, but it won’t kill you right away. It’s similar to low-level radiation, where it might take years of extended exposure to cause any severe defects, but whatever reaction the projectile caused, it accelerated the process. My mom and I, and a few other people, got hit by the cloud before they could contain it. Everyone else affected died within six months, but I’d already developed the ability, and the doctors were able to save my nervous system before it deteriorated past the point of brain death. The downside was that my biotics became pretty much unusable beyond very small fields of energy. And I can’t sustain it for longer than a few seconds.”

She held out her right hand. A small blue field coated her fingers, pulsing in time with her heart, before it dispersed. To her surprise, the echoing twinge of pain in her temple was weaker than she’d expected.

She frowned, and shook her head. “Lexi wants me to train so I can better defend myself, but I don’t know how many times I have to tell her that it won’t do any good.” 

Jaal was quiet for a long time, and when she looked up to meet his gaze, she froze. 

It wasn’t pity, or sympathy, she found, but a deep, resonant attention bent entirely toward her. It wasn’t the first time she’d been caught in that same gravitational pull when she looked into his eyes, impossibly blue and bright, and the rest of the world blurred around him. And yet every time felt new and strange, like he somehow had the ability to reach out with an ethereal tether and pull her out of herself, make her feel acutely singular, and fixed.

More aware of her own body, awkwardly perched on the Remnant console with her combat hard-suit pressing uncomfortably in her stomach, heat rising up her neck the longer he remained silent. 

“What?” she finally asked, her voice coming out in barely more than a whisper.

“You speak of such trauma so casually,” he murmured, “as if it happened to someone else. And yet you wish for a way to control your emotions because they are unbearable to experience?”

A small, rueful smile pulled at her lips. “It’s not that simple.”

“Apparently.”

“Why are you so fascinated with the way I experience emotion?” she asked before she could stop herself, a voice in the back of her head urging her forward, spurring her further, faster, into the pull of his eyes. 

He frowned, and took a deep breath, opening his mouth to speak, and then seeming to reconsider. For a moment, she thought he would dismiss her question, move on to milder, less fraught topics. 

But then he straightened. Took a few steps toward her, and her mind winked blank as he placed his hands on her shoulders. 

His grip was soft, comforting, almost as if he were reassuring himself that she was real. 

His voice vibrated down her spine as he murmured, “Because you are unlike anyone I have ever met in my entire life, Saskia Ryder, and the more I learn about you, the more I find I _want_ to know. Even if it makes me uncomfortable.” 

His eyes roamed over her face, focusing on the blush that spread up her neck and turned her cheeks bright pink. 

“Do I make _you_ uncomfortable?” he asked, softly.

“No,” she whispered, trying to focus on anything but the solid feel of his hands, the closeness of his face. _Jesus_ , he was like staring into the sun, and only kind of in the romantic way. 

“Well, sort of,” she said, looking down at his chest to give herself some reprieve from the intensity of his eyes, “but not in a bad way. You’re just—not what I’m used to. Most people don’t make so much of an effort.”

“That sounds very lonely.”

“It can be,” she murmured. 

A beat of silence. His hands tightened around her shoulders. “Thank you for sharing with me.”

He moved back, but only to lean against the Remnant console she was sitting on, almost as if they were sitting back to back. 

She closed her eyes for one, steadying moment, and then she said, “Thank you for asking.”

He gave her a small, comforting hum of assent, settling behind her. “Your turn.”

She fought her smile as moisture gathered in her eyes, blinking rapidly as she took a shaky breath. “When did you get the piercings?”

He laughed, making her jump as the noise echoed around the small cave. 

“After my first successful mission with the Resistance. And too much _ethraase_.”

“I don’t think the translator got that one.”

He chuckled. “A very potent alcohol that comes from the _olerej_ tree. I think I have heard some humans compare it to… tequila?”

“Oh, god, sure. That sounds pleasant.”

“It was not. My true mother could barely contain herself from laughing when I arrived home the following day with my brow swollen to the point of lunacy. You might be surprised to learn that my compatriots were not of sound mind when I asked them to do it for me. She had to take them out and re-pierce them herself. It was a horrible experience. One she still likes to bring up when I am feeling cocksure.”

Saskia bit her lip against a laugh, and leaned back, resting against him before she could stop herself. 

“True mother,” he continued, not seeming to mind her leaning on him, “by the way, refers to the woman who birthed me.”

She relaxed, letting the solidity of him brace her. “Do most angarans have more than one mother?”

“Yes, though families differ in size and structure. Some might have many fathers, while others have aunts or uncles.” 

“What’s the difference between an aunt and a mother, then? Or are mothers just other women in the household with children, while aunts aren’t the biological mothers of anyone?”

“Yes, though aunts might become mothers. The names are simply ways in which we can describe them to outsiders and differentiate. It is all family.”

They carried on like that for a while, both of them exchanging information, though they quickly lost track of who had asked more questions than the other. 

She couldn’t get his words out of her head, finding she felt the same way about him. Every new revelation was like a symbol unearthed, laid down next to a kaleidoscope of pieces that made up his person. Every laugh a little thread in a greater tapestry, every hesitation marking the edge of something still obscured. 

Saskia took a few of her emergency stim-rations, meant for occasions like this to tide one over until help could arrive. It wouldn’t last indefinitely, but she’d be able to sleep with a full stomach. Or she could try, anyway. Jaal had a few of his nutrient paste packets, and they melted ice from the cave wall, letting SAM analyze it to make sure it was potable for Saskia. 

She didn’t know how long they had been talking, it might have been an hour or four, when she yawned and shivered, weariness finally getting the better of her. 

“Whatever happened to liking the cold?” Jaal asked, easing away from her and walking around to her side of the console. 

“I _do_ like the cold,” she said, blinking to shake the fatigue from her eyes. “But this hard-suit isn’t exactly a down comforter, and it’s still ten degrees.” She gave him a pointed look. “Some of us don’t have an electromagnetic current running over our skin to keep us warm.” 

His brow creased. “Humans produce their own body heat, yes?” 

“Yes, we do,” she said, easing off the console and stretching out her tired limbs. “But we’re not space-heaters.”

“I don’t know what that means,” he said, watching her with a small, amused smile. “Humans are delicate creatures to have lived so long without any natural protection.”

“We do just fine, thank you,” she said, laughing a bit as she checked her omni-tool. The battery would last for another few days, at least, but she didn’t want to press her luck. “SAM, any sign of the storm easing up?”

“No, Pathfinder. I have been unable to coordinate with the Tempest, and will not know the forecast until I can restore the connection.”

“Are you not connected to the ship?” Jaal asked, staring down at her omni-tool, and then up at Saskia, as if he didn’t exactly know how to address the disembodied voice. 

“My connection is stronger with Saskia. When the storm approached, I chose to remain with her rather than retreat to the ship. My awareness is usually not hindered in this way, but I am afraid the storm was too strong to retain both.”

She smiled in surprise. “That was very nice of you, SAM.”

“It was prudent.”

Jaal laughed, and rolled out his shoulders. “Well. I think it’s time to sleep, unless you have more questions I cannot answer about electromagnetism.”

“Come on,” she said, shaking her head. “It is not such a weird thing to be curious about.” 

“Perhaps for _you_.”

She took a step back from the console, and the air grew a bit sharper. “I think the closer we keep to the console, the warmer it will be. It’s still going to a chilly night.”

“Do humans not sleep together for warmth when the situation warrants it, or does your physiology not support sharing body heat?”

It was an innocuous question, and one that should have already occurred to her, but the second she heard it, her mind skidded to a halt. 

_Oh._

“No, we do. I mean, it does.” She blinked, knowing she was probably as red as a beet. “Um, I didn’t want to assume—”

“If the alternative is you freezing to death, then of course you should assume.” Jaal shot her a strange look as he removed his poncho.

She tried not to stare as the full breadth of his shoulders was revealed. It was somehow easier to not think about the shape of him when he was wearing his _rofjinn_. Easier to pretend, anyway. 

“You should remove your hard-suit, Pathfinder,” SAM’s voice shook her out of her ogling. “To better facilitate the transfer of heat between you and Jaal.”

Feeling a little as if she were going mad, she turned around and began unbuckling her hard-suit. This was fine. There was no reason to get worked-up over something as innocent as sleeping next to another person to share body heat. 

_You’re not twelve_ , she told herself as she set her suit aside, shivering as the cold air brushed the edges of her sleeves and collar. The soft-suit underneath was pretty much a skin-tight unitard, leaving very little to the imagination, but it was at least somewhat padded. 

She was grateful for the excuse of the cold air to cross her arms over her chest, hunching just a bit, extremely self-conscious as she was presented with the sheer size of her very large and very _present_ companion.

“The heat seems centralized to the console, not the monolith,” she said, voice a little shaky with the combination of nerves and the chill. 

_There’s nothing to be worried about. It’s Jaal._

He nodded in agreement, and held out his turqouise _rofjinn_. 

She stared at it, and then met his gaze. “Are you sure?” 

He’d just finished telling her about its meaning, that each warrior of the Resistance made their own after they felt they had earned it, and that they were only presented to outsiders when they were deemed worthy of respect and honor. He had only made his a few months before joining the crew of the Tempest. 

“Yes,” he said, inclining his head with a smile on his lips. 

She took it gently, sliding it over her shoulders with a reverence she didn’t quite understand. It was heavier than she’d expected, like a sturdy kind of silk.

He cleared his throat, and for the first time she saw that perhaps he wasn’t entirely unaffected by the idea of sleeping next to her. That he might be a bit nervous as well.

She sat, slowly, next to the console, and laid down, feeling intensely awkward in the moment he was just standing next to her. Pulling his _rofjinn_ around herself, she shivered as she tried to get comfortable.

And then she heard the soft shift of his feet, felt him settle down behind her. She tried very hard not to move as he slid closer, heart racing and mind skittering with sparks. Her shiver was almost unconscious, her traitor of a body reacting when she wanted it to be perfectly still. 

His arm draped gently over her side, a steady, reassuring weight, and immediately the warmth of him seeped through her suit where he touched her. 

They were silent for a few seconds, before she brought her hands to her mouth and blew on them, the cold becoming more urgent than her nerves. 

“Here,” Jaal said, his voice low and resonant. He moved forward, and then they were flush against each other. His other arm moved under her neck, and she let him position his hands over hers. “Since you were so interested in my electromagnetism.”

She was still having trouble accepting that he was literally holding her in his arms, she almost didn’t notice the unfamiliar sensation for a few seconds.

It started slowly, a steady, gentle pulse of what felt like static electricity, that emanated from his hands and bled through hers. 

“What are you doing?” she breathed.

“It is a trick we learned in the Resistance. We might be more adapted to the cold, but it still hinders us.” 

Warm breath danced across her cheek. His chest moved slightly against her back. 

Her heart raced as she tried not to react. She couldn’t remember a time she’d ever been this close to someone, not like this, and certainly not with someone like _him._

“We can project our own aura of electricity into others, stimulating theirs. Or that’s what I think I’m doing. I’m not really sure. It helps others warm up. Even Angara can succumb to extreme cold on Voeld.” A smile entered his voice as he continued, “And apparently it works for humans as well.”

“It tickles,” she murmured, breathing out as heat danced through her fingers and up her arms. Her head fell unconsciously from its rigid position to lay on his upper arm. Every exhale sent heat thrumming through her body as more of him closed around her. 

He chuckled, and she felt it on his chest, making her lips twitch in response. “Does it? Interesting.”

They were silent for a time, and though she was still intensely aware of every inch of her body that was pressed against his, she relaxed. It was hard not to, really, with the heat coming off him in waves. 

And beyond that, the sensation of being held, of being surrounded, was… really nice. She couldn’t remember another time she’d felt so thoroughly cocooned. Safe. 

It was beyond insane that anyone as new and as different as Jaal could invoke such a response in her. Nothing about this galaxy was safe. It was all chaos and death, but lying there, with a… _friend_ wrapped around her, warming her—she felt right. And less alone.

“Is there anything else you can do with your electromagnetic capabilities?” she asked, voice soft. 

She was having trouble keeping her eyes open. With all the stress she’d been under, maybe her body was just shutting down at the first feeling of security in months.

“You are very fascinated by this,” he murmured, still holding her hands, every once in a while rubbing them between his to encourage circulation. 

His skin brushing against hers felt strange, but not unpleasantly so. It wasn’t scaled, or ridged, not like the crest along his brow and head. It was semi-hard, and pebbled. The closest comparison she could make was to a soft turtle shell, or the slick skin of a dolphin.

“That’s because it’s fascinating,” she murmured, absently running her thumb along the outside of his hand. 

It was massive, dwarfing hers. His third finger— _more of a fin, really,_ she thought as sleep dragged her under its comforting veil—could have easily folded over her entire palm.

“Some use it for rudimentary communication. Our scientists believe that we evolved from a nonverbal species and developed language at some point, for unknown reasons. We can’t do much, but certain signals, impressions, can be passed between two angarans by touch alone.”

“That is nuts,” she mumbled, not entirely sure if he heard her as her eyelids slid shut. She knew some mammals back on Earth could sense electrical fields, and use them to stalk prey, but as far as she knew they couldn’t communicate with each other. “And handy.”

He gave another chuckle that vibrated through her entire body. She sighed reflexively, and she didn’t know if he moved closer or she did, but his lips brushed her hair as he said, “It can be. In dangerous situations where speech would otherwise alert an enemy to your presence.”

“You _would_ think of the tactical advantage.”

“There are less urgent applications as well,” he said, frown obvious in his voice. “It enhances our viewing of what you would call movies, and there are artists who have turned the ability into an extrasensory experience.”

He was quiet for a long time, and when he spoke again, she wasn’t quite sure if she heard him correctly, or if she was on the verge of sleep and inventing rather outlandish ideas. 

“Sharing one’s aura can be an intimate experience as well,” he murmured, hesitant, and soft. “Attuning your emotional state to a partner’s is an intensely spiritual and profound connection.”

Saskia hummed, no longer really paying attention to what he said, only the sound of his voice. Heart beating slow and solid in her chest—or maybe that was Jaal’s heartbeat she felt as if it were her own—she sank deeper. 

It might have been a second, or a few minutes, but she forced herself to mumble, “Jaal?”

“Yes?”

“I meant what I said before.” Her voice was so quiet he probably couldn’t hear her. “Thank you for asking. And listening. You don’t know how much that means to me.”

Whatever he said that thrummed down her spine, wrapped around the core of her like a gentle, curling embrace, and was lost. She drifted, pulled into sleep as she lay nestled in the arms of the only person she’d truly felt safe with in this mad, unknowable galaxy. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you, as always, for the lovely feedback and comments. You guys are killing me. In the best way, of course. ;)


	9. Harsh Light of Day

The first thing Saskia knew, crawling out of a hazy half-sleep that clung to her like a comforting fog, was that her hip hurt. A lot. 

The second was that something warm and rumbling was wrapped around her, and that she was very, _very_ reluctant to leave its embrace. 

A soft buzzing sounded somewhere behind her head, and she frowned, burrowing deeper into the shifting mass. Her face brushed rough fabric, the sensation incongruous next to the heat she lay caged inside. The smell of something floral and deep, a bit like… patchouli, filled her nostrils, special, precious, for some reason.

Her eyelids slanted open, soft blue light making her wince as her sight adjusted. 

And then her world was lovely, star-flecked pink. 

It took her all of two seconds to realize that she was less than an inch away from Jaal’s face. 

She froze, eyes shooting wide as her heart lurched to wakefulness. 

Jaal’s face. Hands. Arms. _Body_ , less than an inch from her. 

Somehow, in the night, she had turned around. Her hands were pressed into his chest and, she realized with an unhelpful rush at the base of her spine, _stomach_ , which moved gently under her fingers as he breathed in and out. It was hard, and solid, distractingly so, and it took all of her effort to peel her hands slowly back from him and hold them to her chest. 

_God_ , they were practically flush against one another, his arms wrapped securely around her shoulders, one hand at the base of her neck while the other was draped dangerously close to her hip. Even one of his legs was slightly atop her calves.

Her spine raced with heat and sparks as she tried to think of a way to extricate herself without waking him. 

For his part, he seemed blissfully unaware of her panic. His mouth was slightly open, heavy breath rumbling in his chest. Every few seconds, a loud, ridiculously adorable snore broke from his lips. His brow furrowed, and they moved in the ghost of something that might have been a word, or simply a twitch.

The buzzing sound grew more urgent as she stared at his mouth, his full, parted lips, and she realized with a jolt that it was her com. 

The storm, the cave-in—how long had they been sleeping?

Deciding to throw caution to the wind, she eased back a bit, untangling their legs and pressing gently against his chest. If she could just put a foot between them, then she could wake him up and— 

SAM’s voice broke the tenuous silence. “Pathfinder, Resistance fighters have set explosives at the opening of the cave. I suggest you brace yourself.”

Jaal’s eyes snapped open, and before she could open her mouth to speak, he rolled on top of her. 

She let out a pathetic squeak as she flipped onto her back, his hands now holding her against the ground—not roughly, but as if he were trying to shield her. Her hip throbbed, but her mind was too focused on the bulk of his shoulders, the steady, unwavering control in his posture.

The buzzing sound grew more intense as he blinked, scanned the cave once as his vision came into focus, and looked down at her. 

“Ryder,” he said, voice breaking slightly in his confusion, still heavy with sleep.

It took her a moment to find her voice. She was acutely aware of his knees sitting on either side of her waist, broad shoulders hovering over her protectively, eyes only a foot away and glinting bright blue like the ice behind him, pupils dilated and focused directly on her face. 

“Morning,” she finally managed, hands fluttering uselessly between them, as if she couldn’t decide whether to push him off or… 

_Oh jesus_ , she thought, clearing her throat. “SAM, what’s that about explosives?”

“It appears Liam was able to contact the Resistance, who have offered their aid in—”

A great, resounding _boom_ echoed from the mouth of the cave. Jaal said something distinctly angry in Shelesh, and bent lower, spreading himself over her as the ceiling shook and ice broke off and splintered onto the ground, shattering into little clouds of white dust. 

Saskia twisted under Jaal, reaching for her com just as another tremor ran through the cave. How many explosives were they planning to use? Fumbling under her forearm cuff, she had to reach around Jaal’s arm as he continued to string expletives into her ear. 

“ _Liam!_ ” she shouted as soon as she felt the connection snap into place with her omni-tool and heard the static in her ear. 

“Ryder?” His voice came through sharp and clear. “Oh, thank god, we—”

“Tell those idiots to stop blowing up the cave,” Jaal shouted as he grabbed her wrist, bringing it up to his mouth. 

“They’re going to damage the monolith!” she added, staring at the spikes of rock jutting from the cave walls, trembling and creaking. 

“And _us_ ,” Jaal snapped.

The ground trembled as another explosion went off. A lance of ice that must have been as tall as her broke and shattered across the ground a few feet to their left, directly on top of one of the Remnant barricades. It didn’t look damaged, but Saskia couldn’t exactly tell from her position directly underneath a large, angry angara if there was any structural damage.

Silence filled the cave, and then the muffled sounds of shifting rock and raised voices followed. 

Jaal breathed out slowly, as if he were trying to control his temper, ruffling her hair over her forehead. “That is one way to wake someone up,” he muttered darkly.

“Why didn’t you warn me sooner, SAM?” Saskia sighed, relaxing back against the ground when she was relatively sure the ceiling wasn’t going to come down on top of them. 

“I saw no reason to interrupt your sleep. The cave is structurally sound. I estimate the amount of explosive force necessary to bring it down is well beyond—”

“Are you two all right in there?” Vetra’s voice drifted over the sound of crumbling snow and ice. 

“No thanks to you,” Jaal shouted, chest heaving in his anger. 

Lying under the ground underneath him, it cast his features into a new, distracting light. His jaw clenched, and she could almost imagine the sound of his teeth grinding together.

All at once, the reality of the situation hit her, and Saskia started to laugh. 

Her nerves had been wound so tight for so long, and whatever it was—the fact that she’d been trapped in a cave with an alien, or that sleeping next to him the night before was the closest she’d gotten to intimacy in, well, _ever_ , or that she was more worried about damaging an ancient alien structure than being buried under a few tons of ice on a planet she hadn’t known existed until two years ago—she just… snapped. 

And found it all ridiculously funny.

Jaal’s eyes focused on her, going wide with concern. “Ryder?”

His concern only made her laugh harder, tears leaking down her cheeks as she clapped a hand over her mouth to stop the insane noises currently bubbling out of her mouth. _Oh god, please stop._

“Did you hit your head? Are you… in some kind of shock?” He leaned back, one hand reaching up as if to cup her face. 

“F-fine,” she choked, waving away his hand. Her chest heaved and she tried to catch her breath, which only seemed to make it worse. “I’m laughing.”

“Oh. Why?”

She started hiccuping at the question. Of course he would ask. _Why?_ Like she knew? 

“You c-can get off now,” she managed, batting at the arm still caging her left side. 

“Are you sure you’re not having a fit?” he asked, rolling back onto his feet, crouching.

She tried to get up, her lingering laughter broken by a sharp wince as her hip throbbed in pain. 

“Bruise from last night,” she breathed and sat against the base of the Remnant console, letting the last of the manic laughter die. 

If this was the moment she finally lost it, at least she went out in a good mood.

Footsteps pounded over ice, and then stone. Vetra and Liam came into view, while more people filed in behind them that Saskia couldn’t see. 

“What happened?” Vetra asked, all business. 

Jaal was still watching Saskia closely, but he seemed to relax. “She started laughing. I don’t know about the noises she is making now, but they seem to be related.”

Liam shouldered his gun— _as if he was going to find something to shoot inside the cave_ , she thought with another laugh—and knelt down next to her as he took off his helmet, sweeping a clinical eye over her to assess for any injuries. His training kicking in without delay. 

“Hey Pathfinder, you going into shock?” he asked, voice low and firm. “You feeling all right?”

“You blew up the front of the cave,” she said with a sigh, wiping the tears from her eyes and pushing her hair back, “and you’re asking me if I’m _feeling all right?_ ” She let out a small, stupid giggle, pushed herself up off the console. “How about I shoot you in the foot and ask you if you’re _feeling all right_?”

Liam’s smile was quick. “Seemed like a good idea at the time, since neither of you were answering your coms.”

“We were sleeping,” Jaal grumbled. He stood and moved forward to help Saskia up, before Liam took her hand and pulled her to her feet. 

“Like the dead.” Liam paused, holding out her arm as he stared down at her chest. “Hold on. _She_ got to wear your poncho?”

Saskia came back to herself with a lurch. Face burning, she shrugged out of the _rofjinn_ and held it out to Jaal, who took it with a scowl.

“No, you’re not getting out of this that easily, Ama Darav,” Liam continued as Jaal turned away to start donning his armor, mock outrage in his voice. “Was it chivalry? Or did you lose at poker?”

Saskia took a deep breath and moved around the console, gathering up her hard-suit and trying very hard not to focus on the large group of angara currently filing into the cave. And staring at her with frank, piercing interest.

“Did you bring the whole Resistance?” she asked under her breath as Vetra helped her buckle on her chest and back plate. 

“Liam got worried.” 

Saskia couldn’t see Vetra’s expression under her helmet, but from the sound of her voice, he wasn’t alone. 

“From the light show last night, I’m guessing you got the last symbol.”

“Yeah, thanks,” Saskia said with a small smile. 

“You two hold up all right?”

Saskia nodded, not sure how to describe the evening. Standing in the cave with all these people around, the silent, twilit spell broken with shattered ice and chemical explosives, she could hardly remember the feeling. It seemed like a moment out of time, a few hours where she’d honestly forgotten who she was now as the Pathfinder, or who she was trying to be. There were no kett or ancient secrets to unlock, no hungry mouths on the Nexus to think about, or people left frozen inside their pods on Hyperion, waiting for her to find them a home. 

She’d been just… her. Whoever that was. 

“We should get going,” she said, turning away from the look she could feel coming from Vetra, even if Saskia couldn’t see her eyes. She stretched as more pain thrummed along her side, hoping it was only a bruise on her hip. The ground hadn’t exactly helped it heal overnight. “I could do with some solid food.” 

She checked that the monolith was still working, spending only as much time as was necessary, very conscious of all angaran eyes glued to her as she interfaced with the Remnant tech. 

By the time they got back to the Resistance base and an angaran medic had seen to her bruise to the best of his ability—apparently Jaal wasn’t the only one who didn’t understand the concept of human bruising and had needed to be reassured she hadn’t contracted some deadly disease—Saskia was bending under the night’s lack of rest. 

Even if she had awoken feeling more at ease than she could recall in recent memory. 

She caught some curious eyes following her around the base, but that was to be expected. They’d stared just as readily the first time she had walked off the Tempest, and they probably would for a long time. She was an alien in their home. It made sense that they were cautious.

Jaal and Vetra were speaking strategy with the base’s leader, while Liam had presumably wandered off to “make contacts,” in his own words. She listened while they went over the plan to retrieve the Moshae, her stomach tying itself into knots that writhed like snakes at the base of her spine. 

She watched Jaal closely, noticing the hard set of his shoulders, the tension in his hands that kept wandering over his person, as if he couldn’t keep still. She could only imagine what the wait was doing to him, how the anticipation was driving him mad. 

Not until the end did she catch Vetra’s watchful eye assessing her with some concern. She was used to her crew staring at her like that, but Vetra was usually more subtle about it. 

After the conversation, Jaal excusing himself to speak with some of his former comrades, she headed back to the room they’d been given to stage themselves while at the base. Vetra followed after, silent. Hovering. 

She was used to this kind of treatment from Lukas, though Vetra, it seemed, had more patience. It took her almost an hour to say, mildly, “Hey, Ryder, I don’t wanna overstep…”

Saskia turned, expressionless, to accept whatever concern she was about to receive. About her getting herself trapped in a cave, or nearly losing it that morning to a manic laughing fit. She thought she was ready for whatever Vetra had to say.

She was wrong. 

“Did you and Jaal… _you know_?”

Saskia stared at her. 

Vetra frowned, shifted her weight from one foot to another. “Ah, did you… get close last night?”

“I mean, yeah,” Saskia said, disliking the curiosity in Vetra’s eyes. “We kind of had to. It was cold,” she added defensively.

Vetra was silent for a moment, the tension getting heavier the longer she waited. “Shit, you aren’t joking.” She sighed, dropped her voice, and murmured, “I mean did you guys sleep together? As in sex?”

Saskia couldn’t be sure, but it felt, in that heartbeat, like her stomach had slammed into the vault thousands of feet below the planet’s surface. 

Vetra’s eyes narrowed as Saskia scrambled to regain some level of control over her mind, currently both silent and shrieking in embarrassment. 

“I’m guessing that’s a no,” she said, pursing her lips. 

“No,” Saskia managed, blinking rapidly. How… _what?_ “No. Of course not.”

“Okay.” Vetra paused. “You guys seemed pretty cozy when we came in.”

“He was protecting me from falling ice,” Saskia said, voice breathy and forced.

“You were wearing his poncho.”

“ _Rofjinn_ ,” she corrected without thought. 

Vetra gave her a smile that looked more like a grimace. “See how I might get the wrong idea?”

“It’s not—” She cleared her throat, face burning. “It’s not like that.”

Vetra watched her for a moment, concern replacing her curiosity. “Hey, I’m not judging. Jaal’s really nice. I can see—”

“ _Vetra_ ,” she snapped, finding her voice and trying to sound as confident as she could, “there’s nothing going on between us. Honestly.”

The small voice in the back of her head still floating in that lost cave gave a wistful, longing sigh. 

“All right,” Vetra murmured, eyeing her closely, with a sad smile. “I believe you. But if you do, ah, decide to go down that route, just be careful, is all.”

That managed to break through some of Saskia’s horror. She frowned, relaxing as she asked, “Why?”

“He seems like a good guy. Better than most. And the attention can be nice. Shit, I know I like him, but…” She shrugged. “I think he’s like that with a lot of people. Not in a calculated way, he just seems like the kind of person who has a lot of people thinking he likes them. And maybe he does like a lot of people. I guess we don’t really know, right?”

Saskia listened, her embarrassment fading to something deeper, a gnawing, knowing kind of ache deep down in her gut. 

“And this is only a temporary gig for him, right?” Vetra exhaled, patted her gently on the arm. “I could be wrong. You just… I don’t know, remind me of somebody I know who gets their hopes up a lot. You’ve been through hell, Saskia, I just don’t want you to get hurt.”

Saskia nodded, dropped whatever pretense she’d been holding for herself and Vetra. “I’ll keep that in mind.”

They stood in silence, before Vetra murmured, “For what it’s worth, I think you’re doing about as well as anyone could in your position.”

“Thanks.” She forced herself to look up, give a small smile. “Really. Thanks.”

Vetra patted her arm again, paused. “Can I give you a hug or is that not something you’re okay with?”

Saskia’s brow lifted. “Yeah, of course.”

It was a little awkward with their hard-suits, and she could tell that Vetra was trying to give her some space if she wanted to pull back. 

“I get it, you know,” Vetra added, giving her one more squeeze before releasing her. “The big sister, silent-suffering, thing. Trust me, I _get it_.”

Saskia grinned. A little painfully, but she grinned all the same. “Yeah. It’s like an unspoken rule, right?”

Vetra sighed. “We’re stronger for it, but damn if it doesn’t suck most of the time.” She waved Saskia back when she made to follow her back out into the base. “Take an hour. Relax. I’ll make sure nobody bothers you.” 

“You really weren’t kidding about that special skill of yours,” she murmured, watching the turian go with a lingering smile. 

“Just wait until I know what your favorite candy is!”

Saskia stared at the doorway, more of a flap of plastic than a true door, listening to the sounds of the base reverberate under her feet. 

She pulled a crate over to the space heater, taking off her gloves and letting the orange light dance over her skin in waves. 

Vetra was right. 

She was getting worked up over a few casual touches and some forced conversation. Jaal was nice. Really, _really_ nice, and yeah, she had a crush on him, and sure, she honestly couldn’t remember the last time she’d liked someone so much so quickly, but it was all up in the air, wasn’t it?

She was spiralling from tragedy, forced into a role she couldn’t possibly perform with any authority, no matter her crew’s well-wishes, and she was looking for someone to fall back on. Lukas wasn’t there. She didn’t have someone to call in the middle of the night when she was lonely, or scared, or drowning from the mere weight of living. She was on her own. It made sense that the first person to show any interest would pull at that need. Make her feel special. 

It didn’t help that he was adorable, and handsome, and smart, and generally lovely to be around. It didn’t help that he made her feel light, and alive. And safe.

But a crush was aptly named, and she’d watched Lukas fall in and out of it so many times, she knew better than to let herself get worked up. 

Vetra was right. Jaal was leaving when, _if_ , they found his Moshae. If they weren’t crawling headlong into a hornet’s nest of unspeakable horror and loss. And if they didn’t…

Well. Then none of this mattered anyway. 


	10. Fragile Hearts and Broken Glass

Two days later, Saskia and her team moved on the Kett base. Liam, Vetra, and Jaal joined her, along with ten other Resistance fighters. A small, concentrated strike team to retrieve the Moshae, and to get out just as quickly. But before they could approach the facility from the air, they had to take out the forward scouting post in case their infiltration raised alarms. The last thing they needed was another call for reinforcements if, by some miracle, they found the Moshae. 

It was strange, being around so many angara. Saskia had started to think of Jaal as a unique fixture in her life, but with a whole squad of angara towering over her and expressing themselves in equally boisterous ways, it was easy to see how at ease he was with his own people. How alike he was. How strange it must be for him to be on his own. 

They were hunkered down behind a drift, their snipers following the scouts on the outer edge of the small base, when she felt him shift toward her.

“They’re out of range,” Jaal murmured. “We’re going to have to get closer.”

“Closer means going down in that ditch,” Vetra said darkly, “and losing our cover. I’m not too eager to test out those turrets.” 

She nodded toward the two large turrets set back behind a barricade about twenty yards from the building, covering all areas of approach from the front. They’d be mowed down before they could even attempt an assault. 

One of the angara down the line scoffed, a woman with deep purple skin and a scar that cut through her left eye. “Did you think this was going to end in a friendly chat, _vesagara_? How about we charge, and you can sit here while we do your work for you.”

Jaal bristled and shot the woman a dark look. He said something angrily in Shelesh, and from the tension that rippled through the angara, Saskia guessed it wasn’t pleasant.

“Vetra, can I see your rifle?” she asked, keeping her voice low and trying to ignore the stares that had been following her since they left the Resistance base.

Vetra gave her an odd look, no doubt reluctant to part with her weapon, but held it out. 

“I’m not really sure you’re up for it, Ryder,” Liam said with a weak laugh. “Like your spirit, though.”

Saskia blithely ignored him, raising her omni-tool and settling the weapon on the ground in front of her. The programming overlay came up in a flickering yellow screen, and she searched for the right terminal. She’d been toying with the idea for a while, and now seemed as good a time as any. 

The Remnant data she and SAM had been compiling had interesting implications for weapons technology. Normally, she wouldn’t care, as it was the least interesting thing they’d learned—techn that could reboot and restore a planet-wide terraforming network was more interesting than anything she’d learned about the Protheans back in the Milky Way, and the cultural ramifications were exciting. But she knew her team, or she was starting to, and they’d be less interested in the agricultural breakthroughs it might inspire than a way for them to kill things faster. Or she assumed Vetra would, at least. 

She flicked through a few key algorithmic components, finding what she was looking for, and keyed in the new programming. The Remnant data hovered in the back of her mind like a slow-moving stream, settling her nerves as she filtered through errant pieces of code. SAM supplied the necessary data when she hit a wall, as she found the holes in the gun’s programming and slotted in the changes. 

The gun vibrated as a soft _click_ settled into place. 

Smile tugging at the edge of her mouth, she lifted the rifle and handed it back to Vetra. “The accuracy is going to be horrible, but you should be able to reach a few of the outer scouts. We can head in on the east,” she pointed to a raised outcropping of rock to their left, “and I can overload the turrets while you cover me.”

Vetra stared down at the gun, still vibrating slightly. “The hell did you did to it?”

“Maximized the damage by stripping the clip restriction and dampened the internal core, reworked the distance parameter algorithm.” She shrugged. “It will only last for a few shots before the old programming kicks in. But it should buy us some time.”

“Seriously?” Vetra lifted the rifle, testing its weight as if it were unfamiliar now, and sighted her targets. “This better not blow my face off or I’ll be really pissed, Ryder.”

“We follow the Pathfinder’s plan,” Jaal said, sounding immensely pleased. 

Saskia turned to meet his gaze, and he grinned. 

The resulting rush of heat in her stomach was entirely unnecessary. 

“I guess whenever you’re ready, Vetra,” she murmured, getting out her own pistol and gripping it with a slightly shaking hand. She kept her omni-tool primed and wrestled down the surge of fear that always slammed into her before a fight. 

The first shot kicked Vetra back a bit, but it only seemed to encourage her as she found her target. Far in the distance, a dark spot fell to the ground, tumbling off into the ravine beneath them. 

Vetra laughed and, in quick succession, picked off three more kett surrounding the first turret before the gun let off a small whine and reverted. 

A few of the angara let out whispered cries of surprise, clearly impressed.

“Ryder,” Vetra said as the entire squad started filing down the now empty path to the base, “I could kiss you right now.”

“Please don’t.” Saskia kept her eyes focused forward, running through the cycle of code she would need to overload the turrets. She didn’t need to trip and fall before they even got to the base. 

Someone clapped her on the shoulder, and she didn’t turn as Jaal said, a bit too loudly, “You are a strange and surprising woman, Ryder.”

They engaged the kett before she could respond. Heart hammering in her chest, she went for the first turret, followed by Liam and Jaal, with Vetra in the front and laughing as she sent out a spray of bullets. 

Even after nearly three months of fighting, she still wasn’t used to it. She’d overhead Liam talking once about the adrenaline of battle, had seen Drack’s enthusiastic glee for ripping his enemies apart firsthand. Even Cora, in her severe, focused discipline, cracked a smile every now and again as fields of dark energy blossomed around her like airborne pools of water, directed easily with an innate grace. 

Lukas had mentioned it a few times back when he first started Alliance training, the thrill of engaging an enemy, having all of your senses honed and focused on one goal—to survive, at whatever cost.

Even now, scrambling down to the side of the first turret, blood pounding in her ears, hyper-aware of her fumbling fingers as they skitted across her omni-tool overlay, it was hard to focus. With SAM boosting her tech, it took her only a few seconds to reconfigure the turret and direct it at the kett instead of the angara charging up the center pathway, but the ball of nerves in her throat didn’t vanish. 

One more turret. 

Jaal’s cry of triumph as he slipped in and out of his tactical cloaking shield rang hollow in her ears, every footfall amplified, every sharp breath bringing the tang of smoke and the deep, rank smell of blood. Chest heaving, legs burning, she swallowed, blinked to clear her vision. 

_Breathe. Just breathe_ , she reminded herself as she slammed down to the second turret. One breath, then the next, one piece of code, then the next. One thing at a time. 

The turret shifted above her, and she only had a second to think as the flashing warning of her omni-tool overlay turned red. Someone inside the base was fighting her hack. 

“SAM, can you disrupt the turret’s shield and throw it over mine?” she cried, knowing he would hear her even if she whispered, but unable to keep her voice steady. 

“Done, Pathfinder.”

Most of the kett turrets could be accessed via the extranet, but all of them had hardwiring panels on the center console of the machine itself. Getting to them while they were active, however, was difficult, aided as they were by the heat-seaking guiding system, currently revving up to point in her direction. 

“ _Shit_ ,” she muttered and, before she could stop herself to think and freeze in fear, rolled over the barrier and threw herself at the turret. 

It snapped forward, but before the gun could fire, the shield flickered in and out, and then expanded to include her. That moment of confusion as its programming tried to determine whether or not she was a target was all she needed. 

She slipped into its range and twisted, bracing herself against the spinning mechanism as it turned. A small alarm went off in her ear as its sensors picked up on her body heat. It rotated in a jerking pattern, almost as if it were trying to shake her off. 

One of the metal-frame arms came down on her face, and pain cracked over her cheek as her visor splintered. She nearly fell to the ground as her vision warped. 

_Breathe. Just breathe._

Gritting her teeth, she kicked up her feet, flipping herself around and on top of the turret to get to its manual access panel. It bucked between her legs, but she managed to stay on as it fired wide and randomly caught a few kett. 

She keyed in an override code, flipped open the hatch, and took a few seconds to determine which wire she needed to pull to shut it down. Pulling all of them might just result in her being blown apart as its self-destruct kicked in.

_There_. She slipped her pinky around the last wire, at the same time reconfiguring her omni-tool into a small, focused knife of glistening orange energy, and pulled. The machine whined and shook as smoke billowed from its core. She slammed her fist down, and the knife fried the control panel. 

It stilled under her, and she slumped forward, finding cover in the crumpled remains of the turret. 

Another few minutes of gunfire, and then silence. 

She slid to the ground, bracing herself against the metal. Her breath fogged up the entirety of her visor. Heart racing, sweat beading at her temples, she turned as Liam rushed over. 

“Fuck’s sake, Ryder, when’d you turn into such a badass?”

“I suggest getting to a secure location, Pathfinder,” SAM said as the sharp, biting whine of cold air slipped through the cracks in her visor. “Your internal temperature is dropping without suit containment.”

She nodded, forced herself to move, asking Liam as she turned to the kett outpost, “Did we clear it out?”

“Think so,” Liam said, following her in. “Jaal and a few of the angara are making a sweep just to be sure.”

She sat once she was inside the building, taking off her helmet and bracing it between her knees. Letting her breath even out, her heart fell back into her chest. 

In. Out. 

Fingers braced around the helmet so they wouldn’t tremble. Hard-suit digging into her still-sore hip. Lips dry and parted as she breathed. 

She wasn’t built for this life. She was soft, and nervous. 

Her father should have known that. 

Liam sat beside her with a deep sigh and took his own helmet off. “Seriously, that was impressive out there. Quick thinking. Might make me feel better if you did it without cracking your helmet, though. Maybe let one of your team know so they could cover you. But I guess that’s small change to a Pathfinder.”

Saskia opened her mouth to speak, only to pause as she stared down at the helmet. A lightning crack crawled across the glass, cutting up her reflection and transforming her face into a distorted, misshapen thing. Jagged. Fractured. 

She remembered the biting, burning air that tore down her throat the moment she hit ground on Habitat-7, the panic that crawled into her lungs as she fought to bring up her omni-tool, the vertigo that slammed into her as soon as she realized that she’d just fallen hundreds of feet through the air onto an unfamiliar, hostile planet—and if she’d waited just a few more seconds, she might have choked to death on her own breath.

_Why_ was she so eager to revisit that danger? Throwing herself at that turret could have been suicide. _Would_ have been, if she hadn’t gotten lucky. 

Her lips caught on the unspoken words, hooks in her mouth, hanging there in her mind like a taunt, a joke. 

_I’m not a Pathfinder._

“Still with me?” 

Liam’s voice broke through the memory, and she blinked, moisture filling her eyes as she nodded. 

“It was stupid,” she agreed, raising her helmet and setting her omni-tool to disperse its fast-acting adhesive gel. The glass morphed together again, just as it had all those months ago on Habitat-7. “I just didn’t think.”

“Most people don’t, usually. That’s where training comes in.” 

She met his gaze, staring into his open concern. No pity or frustration, just a question. An offer. 

He’d offered to train her before, but she hadn’t really let the idea take hold. She was useless, and if a small part of her had thought this whole thing was a dream, _still_ thought, if she were being honest with herself, then what was the point of training for something she could never achieve?

“Think about it, yeah?” Liam said with a sideways grin, patting her knee. “It is my job, you know. Here to help.”

Her chest grew tight, and she nodded. 

A flurry of motion made her look up as half the Resistance squad entered, followed by Vetra, who made a beeline for her, shrugging off her helmet with a purposeful look. 

“Already gave her the talk,” Liam said with a laugh as Vetra stopped before them. “Save your breath.”

“The talk?” Vetra scoffed, giving Saskia a wide, proud, smile. “Ryder, that was _amazing_. Stupid. But amazing. You’ve been holding out on us.”

Saskia almost grinned, rising to her feet. 

“And you have a nice shiner to remember it by.” Liam chuckled, leaning back and shaking his head. “The sight of you riding the turret was pretty spectacular, not gonna lie.”

“I wasn’t riding it,” she muttered, acutely aware of the angara staring at her from the building’s entrance. 

“You kind of were,” Vetra said, nudging her on the shoulder with her elbow. “Take the compliment, Ryder. And you might want to wait a few days until you see Lexi for that bruise to fade.”

“Is it that bad?” She reached up gingerly to prod at her cheek, wincing as the skin burned. She wasn’t bleeding, at least. 

“Not yet. But it will be,” Liam said with a wink. 

“Excuse me?” an unfamiliar, accented voice said. 

Saskia turned with a start to find one of the Resistance fighters standing a few feet away, eyeing her hesitantly. “Yes?”

He cleared his throat, and took a step forward. He had light blue skin and stood a bit shorter than the rest of his companions, and sharp, inquisitive eyes. “I was wondering if you might be able to explain how you modified your companion’s weapon.”

Saskia stared at him. 

“I understand if you are… reluctant, after Gevrana’s rudeness to you earlier,” he continued, looking uncomfortable. “Not all of us are afraid of outsiders. And we know that you are here to help the Moshae. That should be enough for getting along, but…”

She finally found her voice, feeling intensely awkward. “I—of course. I’m not entirely sure if angaran technology is the same as ours, but I can try.”

His smile was radiant. “I’d be happy to exchange information with you about our weapons, if that might help.”

Liam hid his snort with a cough. 

“Maybe save the science lessons until after we get back with the Moshae,” Vetra said lightly, giving the angara a skeptical once-over.

“Oh, of course,” he said, fidgeting awkwardly as he backed away. “My name is Taarvis, Pathfinder. I eagerly await our exchange. And thank you.”

Saskia was spared the trouble of responding by the rest of the Resistance entering the compound. Jaal made for them, practically bouncing on his feet as he locked eyes with her. 

“ _That_ was inspiring, Ryder. You rode that turret with such _zeal_.”

Saskia took a deep breath and put on her helmet, hating that her cheeks flushed. Though, maybe the bruise hid some of it. “I didn’t ride it.”

“I will never understand your penchant for modesty.” Jaal shook his head, turning to Taarvis. “Was she not magnificent, Taarvis?”

“She was.” He looked away, almost embarrassed, and returned to the rest of his people. 

“You know that guy, Jaal?” Vetra asked.

“Taarvis is cousin to my brother’s bonded. A new recruit to the Resistance. I oversaw his _vesaal_ myself.”

Liam got to his feet with a wide grin. “Lucky fella’s got a date with the Pathfinder, here.”

Saskia’s face burned and she forced herself not to glare at him. 

“Really?” Jaal asked with a curious smile. “I thought he was interested in men. But it has been a long time since we last saw each other.” He shrugged, laughed—and a hollow disappointment sank into the bottom of her stomach. “I doubt you will have much to talk about, unless he has developed a brighter mind in the last five years. He is eager, I suppose.”

Saskia blinked, and turned. “We should get moving.”

Of all the things to be worrying about, _this_ should not be high on her list. _This_ was silly. And stupid. And mortifying. 

“Oh, come on, Ryder—” Liam started.

Vetra cut him off sharply. “Pathfinder’s right. Time to go.”

Saskia felt Vetra walking behind her, but didn’t turn. They were about to infiltrate one of the most heavily-guarded Kett installations in all of Heleus. A place that no one had been able to enter since the Moshae had been captured, that had claimed the lives of so many angara, Evfra had all but given up hope on retrieving one of their most important scientific and cultural leaders. She needed to focus, especially after her idiotic display with the turret. She couldn’t make that mistake again, not when all of their lives were at risk. 

But no matter how much she hated it, she couldn’t shake the small, pathetic wince at the confirmation that Vetra had been right. And that she was a fool for thinking otherwise. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This goes without saying but there are going to be major plot spoilers going forward. Read at your own risk <3


	11. Trial of Hope

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> There are hella spoilers for the A Trail of Hope quest-line in this chapter. And this is your final warning for major plot spoilers, as they will be abundant going forward. Read at your own risk!

“ _They are us._ ”

Jaal’s words echoed through Saskia’s mind as they ran after the Cardinal. Mind splintered, shattered, with the horror that every kett she’d seen her team bring down, every _single_ one, had once been an angara, torn from their family. Had once been a sister, or brother, or aunt, or cousin. Taken. Twisted. 

_Exalted_.

Her motions blurred together as they fought to the Moshae. She disabled shields, sent waves of errant energy into the kett to distract and destabilize. Pistol in her loose left grip, shots fired wide. Echo and crack, feet pounding on pavement. She was a spectator, watching herself move—dodge right, duck behind cover, fingers slipping over the handle of her gun. She nearly fell off a platform once, before Vetra pulled her back. When Saskia turned, she froze at the look in the turian’s eyes.

Wide, frantic, fighting the swell of revulsion that surged behind them. She reloaded her gun without a word, charged back into the fray, one long leg bounding after the other. 

Move. _Move,_ her voice in Saskia’s ear as she followed her instinctively. She could do nothing else. She could do _nothing._

Liam cursing under his breath as he threw grenades, not watching to make sure they hit their mark, jaw clenched. Breath fogging up his helmet, taking two more seconds than normal to break cover and shoot.

No one was smiling at the thrill of battle now. None of them relished this fight. 

And Jaal…

Weeping over the body of the anagaran man transformed before his eyes. Shuddering, shaking, under the hand she’d laid on his shoulder, unable to say anything, _do_ anything. 

Saskia had stood there, helpless, as she watched him grapple with the weight of the realization that his people had not simply disappeared, but been corrupted. Turned into weapons and thrown back against their families, their comrades, in a living nightmare.

“What can I do to help you?” she’d asked, voice breaking as she looked down at the man who had been so lively, so _bright_ , only hours ago. Who had now seen his fight upended and laid bare before him. 

_Tell me how to fix this._

But there was no fixing this. _This_ was monstrous. 

All her life she’d never truly believed in good and evil, a divine order to the cosmos, or meaning beyond chance and coincidence. God was a word she said to curse and to grapple at something beyond herself, not to invoke, or cast judgement. Morality was relative. There was no black and white. 

Staring at the body of the kett as her friend bent and broke under her hands… she wasn’t so sure. 

Watching Jaal fight now was raw and searing, pain blistering on his face like an open flame, transformed to rage as he cut through the final room of the compound like a reaping scythe. Screaming in defiance against the truth, against his own suffering heart. 

It nearly broke her too. 

And so she detached, cut a tether in her mind. She floated above herself, distant to keep from touching that pain. It was too much. All of it was too much. 

Face blank, lifeless, sweat matting her hair, bruise pulsing on her cheek, lip split from… somewhere. She couldn’t remember when she’d hit her face again. The taste of rust coating her tongue like poisoned wine. 

SAM might have been moving her limbs for her, for all she knew—ducking behind cover when the kett Cardinal emerged and directed spheres of charged electrical current toward her, sprinting out of the way as they detonated. Her gun ran out of ammo, and she hadn’t remembered firing. _Click_. Another clip. Another jerking run of her fingers over her omni-tool. A buzz in the back of her mind like bees swarming. Static energy making her skin itch. Her temple throbbed. And something hard writhed beneath her fingers like snakes, searching for release. 

And then she was running toward the Moshae, sprawled out and unmoving. _Don’t be dead,_ her heart beat. She dropped to the ground. Readied her medi-gel. _Don’t be dead._

“She’s okay,” she choked out, to herself, to the Moshae, to the unfeeling air, she didn’t know. “SAM, can you read her vitals?”

“She is alive,” SAM confirmed as Saskia tipped the woman’s head up, saw her eyelids flutter, “but she needs immediate medical attention. Her immune system is compromised. She is weak, Pathfinder.”

The Moshae’s lips twitched, and she said something, but Saskia didn’t hear her in the chaos of her own pounding heart. Her purple skin was pale, eyes sunken, but still sharp, assessing. 

When Saskia looked up, Jaal was sitting across from her, face streaked with tears. Agony shone through his turquoise eyes, and she felt it like a lance through her chest. They had to get out of this place, this… reeking, festering place. 

But not without the angara still left in pods, waiting for exaltation. 

“We have to get your people _out_ of here,” she muttered, barely able to string the words together. 

Relief flashed across his face, and he was gone again, to organize the Resistance still inside the prison, to get as many as they could out before the kett arrived to reclaim their factory of assimilation. 

Her hands trembled as she tried to pick up the Moshae. A dim, itching sensation grew in her chest, along her arms, but she couldn’t stop or she was going to collapse. She had to get the Moshae up. They had to move. 

“ _I am sensing an uptick in your biotics, Pathfinder_.” SAM’s voice echoed through her mind, joining the voices of the Moshae, Vetra, Liam, and the Cardinal—but it was the last which slammed into Saskia like a brand. 

“You will all know the glory of the Archon’s light. I, too, was lowly once, like you. You should _beg_ for exaltation.”

The words careened around her hollow chest, and she tasted fresh blood. When had she bitten down on her tongue?

Liam joined her, taking the Moshae and relieving Saskia of the burden alone. She tried to stay focused. They needed to get out. Everything else could wait. She could deal with this horror once the Moshae was on the shuttle. If everyone got out, it would be fine. She would be fine. 

Vetra hovered next to the Cardinal, watching, gun trained on the kett woman still spewing her rhetoric into the air like noxious gas. 

“It is a gift,” she insisted. “A gift we bring to _all_ of Andromeda.”

_Gift._

Saskia felt herself turn, lock eyes with the Cardinal. The sounds of the base faded to leave only the pumping of her own blood through her ears. Time stretched as she stared at the twisted, ridged face. The barbed teeth. 

What had she been… before?

“Thank you for leaving my holy place intact, Pathfinder,” the Cardinal, the kett, the _monster_ said. Voice ringing with purpose, with _pride_. “I will remember this kindness.”

It was that, more than anything—more than Jaal’s tear-stained face, or Liam’s shaking hands, or Vetra’s panicked eyes, or even the Moshae’s frail, emaciated body—that pierced Saskia’s howling chest. 

She blinked, and her pistol was pointed at the Cardinal’s face. The shot rang out. Her hand jerked as the gun moved with the momentum of the blast. 

The Cardinal’s head snapped back, lips parted in shock. Her body followed slowly, and then all at once, landing with a dull thud against the metal floor. A line of green blood sprayed around her head on the ground. A halo of weeds. Snow drifted in from the open roof. Whistling wind, trailing eddies over the still, lifeless form of the monster she’d… she’d… 

“ _Saskia,_ ” SAM said into her mind, “ _your biotics are growing unstable._ ”

Along the length of her arm, blue light trailed up into the air. Only then did she feel her temple pulse, her fingers shake and clench. Sparks went off in her vision, black and then white, and then bristling, electric blue. 

She couldn’t move. Her eyes were fixed on the body. The Cardinal looked smaller now, not towering above her wreathed in orange light. Just crumpled. Her hand was twisted behind her back at an odd angle, like one of the Remnant symbols.

“ _Saskia_. _Can you understand what is happening?_ ” 

She blinked, heart stuttering as SAM’s voice sounded… as it sounded almost like her father’s. The image in front of her eyes warped with a hazy light. A distant call tugging at the back of her mind. 

“ _I am going to dampen your abilities_ ,” he said, that grinding moment of clarity gone just as fast as it had come. “ _Do not be alarmed if you feel lethargic._ ”

A weight pushed down on her thoughts and she shivered, all of her senses dulled as the energy over her hand vanished. She blinked, dropped her arm. How long had she been standing there? It might have been only a moment, or an hour. 

Only then did she realize the pain building in her temples had grown in intensity. 

Somewhere she heard the Moshae’s approval, Vetra’s low question of concern.

And then SAM over everyone’s coms, “Kett airships are inbound, Pathfinder.”

Someone pulled on her arm and she nearly dropped her gun. 

_Her_ gun. 

When had she started to think of it as hers?

They were out in the open, people screaming as more gunfire sounded. Each click and boom piercing her mind like tripwires. In the distance something exploded. The ground shook. Fiends bellowed and roared as they ran toward them. She kept her feet moving. Voices, urgent, spiraling around her as everyone ran for the shuttle. Loud. Sharp. Painful.

The Cardinal’s body swam before her eyes. Lifeless. Broken. Just like the angara. The kett. 

Someone helped her into the shuttle—one of the Resistance fighters. Before the door closed, she turned back to the compound. Her eyes found the small, dark form of the Cardinal, far back and obscured by other soldiers, other abominations, other experiments in perfection. 

And then the door shut. And there was only silence.

 

* * *

 

Jaal sat next to the Moshae, his teacher, his guide, truly another mother not bound by familial ties but something deeper, and felt himself break apart. He remembered her as a force of nature, an overwhelming calm, a center of radiant peace and focus. 

Once, when he had been foolish enough to test her patience, she had turned those sharp amethyst eyes on him, and with only a glare and her silence, sundered him to his core. He had felt so very small. It was the image he’d fixed in his mind’s eye the day he learned of her capture. The one he carried with him in the fearful months after, every day since reassuring himself that no one could break her. Not even the kett. 

She lay on a stretcher next to him where he sat in the back of the shuttle, equipment beeping, scanners telling him truths he did not want to hear, that her body was close to failing, that he had very nearly lost her—and it was she who looked small. 

_Small, but_ not _broken._

It was the only thing keeping his sadness from overtaking him. The _only_ thing he clung to, her hand in his, her grip perhaps not as tight as it had once been, but still firm, still vital. 

_They are us._

It crashed over him again and again, waves beating back against a shattered cliff, every time dragging him deeper down into the depths of his despair. 

The monsters _took_ his people… and ripped out the heart of them. Excavated their chests to be replaced with something vile, a hard, tumorous _lack_ of what made them angara. 

How could he survive this? How many had he killed, not knowing? How many of his brothers, sisters, _friends_ , had he shot down with fury and vengeance in his heart? How many small victories did he celebrate as, one by one, his people died again, and again? How many second deaths did he dole out without mercy?

Piece by piece, his people added to the pyre of their own unmaking. 

And they did not know.

“Hey,” a soft, rasping voice resonated above him, “you should drink something.”

He looked up, pulled back from the brink, to find Vetra holding a small cup out to him. 

“Thank you, Vetra,” he murmured, taking her offering without looking to see what was in it. 

“Just water,” she added, as if she were trying to fill the space, the silence. “Figure we all need it.” She nodded to the Moshae, eyes a bit wider than normal. “How is she doing?”

It was hard to read turian expressions, their faces harder and less familiar than most of his new companions, but he thought she looked frayed, unnerved. Strange, to see her so shaken. 

“I—I don’t know,” he murmured, voice breaking. 

She let out a ragged exhale that might have been a sigh, and leaned forward to press her hand against his shoulder. To brace him against the fall. “I am so sorry, Jaal.”

He looked up to meet her gaze again, and found to his dim surprise, coming to him from across the barren landscape of his grief, that nothing about her compassion felt foreign, or detached. She was an alien, yes, like Liam, and Saskia, but she was not _alien_. 

He had no response, in his confused state of revelation and pain, so he simply nodded. 

She understood his silence, and moved to take a seat beside him. 

He was infinitely grateful that she had not decided to give him space. 

Jaal looked forward, saw Liam with his elbows braced on his knees, hands clasped as his legs moved in a jerking, nervous pattern. He looked up in concern, eyes darting around the shuttle as if he couldn’t bear to remain still, though they kept settling on the figure in the doorway of the pilot’s cockpit. 

Saskia Ryder stood against the frame, one hand gripping the edge, while the other hung at her side. Her body was still, rigid, and though he could not see her face, he imagined it was a cold mask. The only sign that she had not turned into a statue was the small clenching of her fingers, a twitch. 

Since that horrible truth had been revealed to him in the depths of the kett prison, she’d been like a wraith at his back. Face blank, eyes empty. Movements spare and jerking, robotic. No sign that she lived beyond the sweat on her brow and the sharp rasp of her breath. 

Except for the flash of pain when she gripped his shoulder, when she asked him what she could do to help. It was kind—kinder than he’d expected, if he were being honest. 

And when the question, the _plea_ , to save what was left of his people formed on his tongue, she had looked to him and stated, without hesitation, that she would not leave them behind.

A small part of him knew the Moshae was right. Leaving the kett prison intact was unforgivable, and he would never have advocated for such an outcome before, but he could not let them die. He would not bend to such death, not anymore. Not if he could save just one. He would balance the scale. As long as it took. 

And he had not even needed to ask for her help. 

Like stone come to life, she turned to him, cold steel in her eyes, and said, “We could stabilize her at the Resistance base, but I think Lexi’s equipment might be more advanced than what your people have. My call would be to take her to the Tempest. Now.”

Jaal nodded, unease twisting in his gut at the flat tone of her voice. But he remembered Liam’s words all those weeks ago; “ _Some people process grief in different ways_.”

If this is how she dealt with adversity, by turning herself into an unfeeling shell, he would not judge her for it. Not when he was burning alive. 

Except Liam seemed disturbed by her emptiness as well, eyes meeting his in silent alarm. He hadn’t seen the shot that killed the Cardinal, and he had only felt righteous fury at the sight of her broken on the ground, frustrated that _he_ had not been the one to end her life. But staring at Liam now, his concern shining out like a beacon as Saskia turned blank eyes on them all… 

“I agree,” he said, trying not to think about _her_ , even in the face of everything else. 

She held his gaze, unblinking, and nodded. “SAM, open a channel.”

“Channel open, Pathfinder.”

Kallo’s voice came through, a bit of static on his end with the storm overhead. “Pathfinder—”

“We have the Moshae, but her vitals are bad. Tell Lexi to prepare for the worst.”

Jaal flinched at the finality of it, at even the possibility that now, after all this, he could still lose her. 

Saskia’s eyes softened for one, faltering second, and then she said, “We’re ten minutes out.”

“We’ll be ready, Ryder,” Kallo said sharply, and the channel cut off. 

Silence expanded inside the shuttle, angara, human, and turian alike staring at the Pathfinder, as if waiting for permission to keep breathing. 

But she only had eyes for him. And when she spoke again, her voice broke in its ferocity. “She’s going to be all right.”

A promise she couldn’t keep, he knew that. She was no more a medic than he was, could do nothing more for his Moshae than lend her well wishes and pray to whatever god she worshipped that her body would hold out for another ten minutes. 

But it was enough to keep him breathing as their shuttle rocketed toward an alien ship that held his hope as a lifeline.

The other Resistance fighters held back as they moved the Moshae onto the ramp of the Tempest, hesitating, as if their victory was still floating somewhere in the ether between the Moshae’s life and death. Jaal gave them what he hoped was a reassuring glance, but their fear was his. He promised to return with news as soon as he could. They would want to know, one way or the other. 

The Pathfinder team was waiting in the hangar. Lexi took one look at the Moshae carried between himself and Liam, and lurched into action. She directed them with stark efficiency, and the next few minutes blurred into one endless image moving through the belly of the Tempest. 

He heard a few of the others ask— _what happened?_

And he could not answer. Not yet. Not until he knew. 

He thought Vetra and Liam hung back. They disappeared at some point, in any case, and when they reached the medbay, only he and Saskia remained, sitting on the other side of the room on a small bench. 

He did not know how long it took Lexi to monitor her vitals, to administer nutrients and run tests, to pull the broken threads of his Moshae back together slowly, carefully. 

The silence was so deafening he might have screamed if his voice had not shriveled into a frightened, empty thing. His body shook and his mind flashed between the room with the angara, a brother, lying on the ground in front of him, dead and warped into the villains of his nightmares. It was wrong. All of this was wrong, so wrong it pulled him apart and gnawed at his soul. 

He nearly jumped out of his skin as he felt something move across his hand where he gripped the bench. 

Small, soft fingers pulled his from the metal, eased them up with deliberate purpose. 

Saskia’s eyes were locked on the Moshae, unmoving—had she even blinked since they sat down? But her hand grasped his with a strength belied by her slight form. Strong enough to hurt. To make him remember that he _lived_ , and he felt. He was not trapped in that room, hovering in the air with needles rammed into his chest. He was safe. He was whole, no matter how much he wanted to break apart. 

Something small and achingly fragile unspooled in his chest, something very like relief, and he slipped his fingers through hers. 

Just as in the Remnant cave, he marveled at the size of them. Such a tiny grip for one who stood as sentinel in front of them all. Again, they were cold, and trembling, though not because of the temperature. It had taken her so long to warm up in his embrace that night, wondering if she might freeze to death while he was sleeping. The woman he’d glimpsed then was soft and bright, sad, but shining. A shaft of moonlight, ephemeral and revealed in a moment of clarity.

Sitting in the medbay now, it was easier to stare down at their intertwined hands than the scene in front of him. To draw on some of her strength, her surprising, incongruous strength, and to allow himself one moment of reprieve. Her grip, her unerring focus, even the steel in her eyes and the clench of her jaw—hard, unyielding, eternal—gave him comfort. 

The woman sitting beside him now was formed of diamond, a blazing light against the dark that threatened to overtake him. 

After what felt like hours, Lexi came over to them both, eyes tired and shoulders slumped in her fatigue, and told him the Moshae would survive. 

The words passed through him, warm, welcome. He bent forward, fresh tears leaking from his eyes. Tension released its stranglehold on his shoulders and they shook. That spool of relief unwound in his chest and he sobbed at his joy in such terrible sadness.

She would survive. 

He hadn’t truly let himself believe it. After this horrible day, he hadn’t let himself hope. 

Saskia’s hand tightened around his, and she said, “Thank you, Lexi.”

“She’s going to be asleep for a while, but I’ll let you both know when she wakes up.” Lexi paused, and even through his relief, he heard hard concern enter her voice. “You two look like you could use some attention as well.”

Saskia pulled her hand from his, so quickly it cut, and stood. 

“I need to contact Evfra.”

_Evfra_. He had not even thought… 

“I can—,” he started, looking up to find her already moving past Lexi to the door.

“I can do it,” she interrupted, voice softening as she met his gaze. “You should stay.”

He watched her leave, something urging him to rise, to follow. He hadn’t thanked her for… for everything she had done, for his people, for _him_. 

“I will return,” he told Lexi, who seemed caught between the same urge, held by the patient behind her, and the one in front. He hesitated. “If… that is—”

“Of course, Jaal,” she said with a sigh, sitting back against the counter and rubbing her eyes. “Of course you’re welcome to stay with her.”

“Thank you, Lexi,” he said, another string of tears moving down his face. “ _Thank you._ ”

The doctor nodded, a sad, tired smile on her face. 

He looked at his Moshae again, reassuring himself of her slow breath, the steady beeping of the monitor at her side. She would survive. 

Saskia stood in front of the door to her quarters, frozen, left hand clenched at her side. A pale figure in the shallow blue light of the ship. Her armor was bloodied and streaked with black stripes of residual flame. 

“Ryder, I—”

She jumped, and jerked around, as if she hadn’t heard him approach. 

Only then did he see her, _truly_ see her. Her eyes were not just flat, but rimmed in red. The bruise on her cheek was a dark, menacing purple, almost black against her translucent skin. Her bottom lip was split in the center and swollen bright red. Diamond, she might be, but flesh too. And more fragile than he had realized. The thought was… troubling. 

“You are hurt,” he murmured. 

Her brow creased, and she frowned, or winced, he couldn’t tell and was too tired to try. 

“We all are.”

Again, something released in his chest, a realization blooming. It was true, all of them had been hurting on the shuttle ride home. Not just the angara, the Resistance, but his newfound friends. The burden of the atrocity might lay solely on his people, but it was felt by all. 

“I—,” he started, the words tangling together in his throat, the feeling too strong, too large to convey with any accuracy. “Thank you for letting my people escape that nightmare.”

Her expression tightened. “Of course.”

A laugh, weak and startled, broke through his lips. “You say that like it was a foregone conclusion.”

Her gaze held, and though there were cracks in her facade, he found the same determination that had bolstered him on the shuttle, that had held him fast in the medbay. 

“It was to me,” she finally said. 

He stared at her, unable to comprehend the ringing truth in her words. This woman, strange and cold and at times more frightening than Haranj at the center of his galaxy, so easily spoke that which not even his Moshae could. She had made the decision without hesitation, without judgement. She had chosen life for his people, even if death might be easier, smarter. 

Something brittle and sharp flashed across her face, and she said in a ragged, broken whisper, “We’re going to end them, Jaal. I promise.”

In her eyes a fire sparked, cold and harsh like the howling winds of Voeld. A slow-burning star raged at her core, so primal, so powerful, that he could do nothing _but_ believe. 

He didn’t know what made him move—fear, relief, hope, the hollow victory that hung over them both. But staring into her eyes, her conviction stirring him to some semblance of his former self, he could not stop from pulling her into his arms.

She froze, and that second of hesitation reminded him that no matter how much he might need physical reassurance, she might not want to give it. He was about to pull away, apologize—when her hands spasmed against his chest, and she returned his embrace with the same desperate ferocity that sang inside him. 

“Thank you,” he whispered, for her touch, for the promise, for doing what no one had been able to do in years, for coming to his galaxy in the first place. 

Her grip tightened, her face pressed into his shoulder so he could hear her soft, broken sigh. This close, he could smell the sweat and melted snow in her hair, and something clean and tart, like the scent of the sprawling keshdi orchards on Aya that blew white blossoms across the capital city in spring. A trembling shudder went through him, and he felt her grip tighten.

They stood holding each other in the shallow light of her doorway, until she moved back, and murmured, “I wasn’t kidding about contacting Evfra.”

“I will do that.” He pulled his arms from her shoulders, reluctant to let go, but forcing himself to remember who she was, who he was to her. “He should hear it from me.”

She looked up with glistening eyes, blinked a few times, and nodded. “You’re probably right.”

Neither of them spoke for a long time, Jaal’s throat tight in a way he couldn’t understand. Staring down at her, it was hard to ignore the pulsing echo in his chest as he mapped her face with his eyes. It wasn’t longing, or attraction, not really, but that same urge he’d felt the day they first met. The insane drive to leap into an unknown horizon, and trust that the universe would threw out a net. Something like certainty, but more frightening. 

She took a breath, and her expression hardened. Meeting his gaze one last time, she turned and retreated into her room without another word. 

Jaal stood before the closed doors for a long time, rooted to the spot as that certainty blossomed and grew inside him. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I try to reply to everyone's comments, but I can never say enough how amazingly supportive you guys have been the past few weeks (only a few weeks??? feels like forever I've been writing these dummies) and I am so incredibly grateful for every single one of you. It is beyond. <3 All my love and hugs. Seriously. 
> 
> (And before anyone mentions it, yes I meant for this chapter to be "trial" and not "trail" <3)


	12. Into the Abyss

The doors to Saskia’s room closed with a soft, whirring _click_. For a moment, she felt nothing, saw only the quiet hope in Jaal’s eyes, the gentle brightness that made it easier to forget the hell she’d just been through. How anyone could see _that_ , know that kind of evil, and still smile with his brilliant sunshine glow… 

She hadn’t wanted to leave him or the Moshae, even if she was an outsider. She would have stayed, intruded, to keep back the bristling cloud of realization that hovered at the edge of her mind—a static pulse that grinned like some chesire thing, waiting until she broke, until she couldn’t keep hold of the tenuous stillness that she’d wrapped around herself like a vice since boarding the shuttle. But however much she’d clung to Jaal like a life raft, trying in vain to remember that this wasn’t her pain to let consume her, it wouldn’t hold forever. 

The gentle beeping whir and hum of the ship rose up her legs, over her stomach and chest, lapped at the edges of her chin. Her eyes stared blankly through the window over her bed, the howling winds of Voeld pulling, scraping at pieces of her that unraveled the longer she stood still.

Her head fell back against the door, her breath hitched. Her body sank slowly, eyes unseeing and fixed on the window. She sat there for a long time, what might have been hours, huddling in her small, silent place of nothingness. Aware only of her hands, shaking against her knees, the faint, almost imperceptible vibration under her feet. The light beyond the window didn’t change. Everything was a faint white glow, shadowed and empty. She couldn’t hear the sounds of the planet outside, couldn’t hear anything but the slow, hard beat of her heart. 

_Her hands jerks and the body falls, green weeds crawling across the ground behind its head. Beetle black eyes stare up at her, mocking her—a_ gift _, Pathfinder. Your_ gift _…_

She shut her eyes against the raw sting of tears and pushed herself off the door, peeling off her soft undersuit and throwing it to the ground. It stank of sweat and the reek of sterile, cloying _exaltation_ , something in the air of the base that had clung to her hair and skin like oil. Had followed her out of the kett base and into her room. 

She had to get it off. She had to do something to rid herself of the stench, the memory.

She moved without thought to the shower, shivering at the cold air against her sweat-chilled skin, and stopped. In a tight, nearly illegible hand was written, _Something got into the water filtration system. Think it’s a rodent. Have to use the communal shower for now like the rest of us chumps. Big apologies. —Gil_

Saskia stared at the paper for a long moment, her mind sluggish and fractured as it tried to wrap itself around something so mundane as her shower being broken. 

“SAM,” she muttered, voice breaking and ragged, “what time is it?”

“The approximate time would be 02:43am.”

“Is anyone still awake?”

A pause. “Kallo is sitting at the Tempest’s helm, going over navigational diagnostics.”

Of course. Kallo might have been the only other person on this ship to sleep less than she did. 

She chewed on the inside of her cheek, weighing the need to shower with the prospect of running into him. He wasn’t the type to pry, even if she liked him quite a bit. There was an order to the way he thought that rang familiar to her, both of them more accustomed to dealing with numbers and machines than people. She could risk meeting him in the communal showers. 

As she pulled on an oversized flannel, one of her brother’s discarded shirts she’d taken before leaving Hyperion, she reasoned that even if Kallo was awake, he probably wasn’t going to be using the shower at this time of night. And he definitely wouldn’t linger if he stumbled upon _her_ using it.

SAM hovered at the back of her mind, an imagined sphere of energy where his incorporeal judgement watched her. 

She wouldn’t think about what had happened. She didn’t even know if it was real, or just another series of flickering images, impressions, of the kett facility. She might have imagined it. 

Her biotics surfacing in that state of total emptiness that had come over her as she raised her gun to kill…

To kill…

Her clothes came off in a daze as the bathroom closed behind her. Normally, she’d be worried that someone might see her naked, but her mind was so full of other things, the jerk of her hand, the tingling pulse of dark energy over her skin. The sick thud of the body hitting snow-covered ground. 

She fumbled for the shower console. Water burst from over her head, and she tried to catch her breath. It was warm. Too warm. Her lips stung where it flowed over the cut, her cheek throbbing. Other wounds drew attention to themselves, her still-bruised hip, a soreness in her back. All of them molding together to pulse in a slow, aching heat. 

She blinked, passed her fingers over the console—and the water turned cold. Slowly, the manic heat faded to a slight shiver. Hands braced on the slick, clouded glass, she breathed. Along her arms were small patches of red and purple, old bruises that had yet to fade. Interspersed between them were the jagged lines of skin so white it looked like bone. Places where the disease had taken more of her color, had left its mark in indelible ink, as if the damage to her nervous system wasn’t enough. Like scars of watercolor translucence, slashed at random over her arms, stomach, legs. A map of ancient trauma spaced over her body without care.

Staring at her hands, her wrists, she almost willed the energy to rise again. As if by taunting it, daring it, she might somehow master it. But her pain was slow and her body shaking from the cold, not fear. 

It wouldn’t come. Not when she wanted it to.

“ _Cora is awake as well, Saskia,_ ” SAM said. 

She jumped, heart leaping into her throat at the sudden clarity of his voice in her mind. 

Through chattering teeth, she managed, “Why didn’t you say before?”

Another pause. Awareness broke through her confusion. 

Was SAM… lying to her?

“SAM?” she asked, unable to comprehend his silence. 

“ _I thought it best for you to talk to someone about your experience today._ ”

His voice was the same as it always ways, clear, unemotional, but she imagined a thread of hesitation in it. 

“What—,” she started, sure she’d somehow fallen asleep in the shower and was hallucinating, when a soft knock on the outer door to the bathroom sounded over the rush of water. 

“Hey, Ryder, that you in there?”

Saskia froze. Had SAM _woken Cora up?_ To _talk_ to her?

“I’m coming in,” Cora continued, voice low. 

“Just—” Saskia spluttered, shutting off the water and pushing her hair back from her face. “Ah—just give me—,”

“There are towels in the side compartment,” Cora said as if she could see through metal. _If anyone could…_

She hadn’t even thought to bring a towel with her. “Oh. Thanks.”

Silence on the other side of the door as she fumbled herself dry, tugged on her shirt while she was still mostly wet, only to realize that she also had not brought any pants. 

“You couldn’t have reminded me about pants?” she whispered to SAM, anger flashing at the back of her mind. If he was so interested in interfering he could at least help her out. 

“What?” Cora asked, edging open the door to peer in. 

“Nothing,” Saskia managed, wrapping the towel around her waist and freezing as Cora stepped into the bathroom. 

Both of them were silent for what felt like an eternity. Saskia stood awkwardly by the shower, hair dripping onto her shoulders as she tried to figure out what to do with her hands. 

Something about Cora’s gaze, steady, piercing, judgemental, made her feel like she was ten years old, even if she was only a few years younger in reality. The woman acted like her fellow asari commandos, drawing from centuries of knowledge and wealth. 

“SAM told me you were in here,” Cora started, face impassive except for a small furrow in her brow. 

Saskia exhaled, fought the urge to ring out her hair. “You need something?”

She stared, assessing in that eternally patient, critical way she always did. “I figured you’d be sleeping, after the day you had.”

Saskia shrugged.

“Liam and Vetra told me what happened.” Cora waited, as if that were explanation enough. “Sounds like hell.”

It came on slowly, the brief flash of anger at SAM morphing into a slow, building frustration. What did she expect her to say to that? How exactly was she supposed to fall asleep with the horror of that place playing on repeat in her mind? 

“It was,” she muttered, willing her voice not to break. 

Cora didn’t speak for a long time. “I was hoping to catch you alone.”

“Why?” Saskia asked, voice a hard line. 

“I wanted to see how you were doing.”

The words dropped like pebbles onto the ground between them. 

_Now_ she wanted to see how she was doing? After three months working together, today was the day Cora finally wondered _how she was doing_? All the passive aggressive comments about her being unqualified, about how she was forced to play second fiddle, again, to someone who didn’t deserve the job. Feeling like she’d been passed over, _again_. Because Cora and her father had been so damn close?

Dimly, she knew the anger was unjustified. Saskia had kept far away, not wanting to interact with Cora’s anger or disappointment, or whatever she had to say about her father’s intentions. 

Her father was dead. And he’d made her Pathfinder. And neither of them could do anything about it. 

“Look,” Cora said, deflating as she crossed her arms, “I realize we haven’t—” She shook her head, a look of fatigue passing over her eyes. “I just thought you might want to talk to someone who knows what you’re going through.”

A small break filtered through Saskia’s chest, and she laughed. It was a manic, sharp-edged thing, without any trace of humor. 

Cora tilted her head, not angry, but assessing. “You don’t think I do, do you?”

“No, I don’t.” Saskia heard the hardness in her own voice, and looked away. She didn’t have the energy to deal with this. She didn’t want to fight with anyone. 

Why the hell would SAM think _this_ would help her? And more to the point, what did this have anything to do with her duties as Pathfinder? 

She understood him stepping in today to stop her from hurting herself. What had happened… it had been a long time since she’d ever been in danger of her biotics growing that unstable. There was probably something wrong with her implant, with the heightened stress that she’d been under. Her condition resurfacing again, as it had occasionally through the years. 

It might even have something to do with the fact that an AI had rewired her brain and brought her back _to life_ a few months ago.

“You don’t think I’ve ever been in a situation where my biotics acted up because I was emotionally compromised?” Cora’s voice was even, but she must have seen the shadow in Saskia’s eyes. “Yeah, they told me all about you shooting the Cardinal. About how they’d never seen you use your biotics, and then all of a sudden the gravity shifted and you were sheathed in blue light.”

Fear lanced through Saskia’s chest as she looked up. She had only seen her own hand, her vision so focused on the kett that she hadn’t realized… 

The full weight of SAM’s interference, of his need to manually dampen her biotics like she were a malfunctioning machine shooting off sparks, slammed into her, and her breath cought. 

_The jerk of her hand, finger releasing a trigger_ — 

“Hey, Saskia,” Cora murmured, voice low now, and gentler than she’d ever heard it. When had she moved across the room? 

“I’m—,” she tried to say _fine_ , but the word stuck in her throat, “I didn’t—”

“Yeah, I figured.” Cora hovered close, but didn’t pull her in for a hug, thankfully. 

Saskia didn’t need something else constricting around her right then, as the room shimmered and her chest tightened painfully. It wasn’t anxiety, or a panic attack, not like it usually was. There was something darker threaded around the emotion reaching up her spine. Something fearful.

“Was that…” Cora started, trailing off. “Have you ever killed anyone before today?”

Eyes wide and focused on the floor, tracing the outline of her toes, she shook her head. 

She felt, more than saw, Cora nod. In agreement? Sympathy? Whatever the woman was thinking, Saskia didn’t raise her head to see. 

“I was nineteen.”

The shrill self-loathing crawling up her throat paused, waited. _Nineteen?_ She had a hard time thinking of Cora as ever being that young. 

“I’d already been shoved out of the Alliance because everyone was afraid of me, or of what I could do, I guess. Asari commandos believe in on-the-job training, so I was neck-deep in a gang fight on Thessia before I could blink. It was chaos. Everyone was shouting. I couldn’t tell my right hand from my left. And then this krogan was barreling down on me, so I closed my eyes and just pointed my shotgun. Got him square in the forehead. Next second all I know is I can’t hear anything anymore and the storefront next to me is shattered.”

Saskia folded her hands in front of her to stop them from shaking, remembering the lapse in memory, the stuttering frames of experience, the missing moments she couldn’t account for. 

“My commanding officer chewed me out so hard, I spent the entire night sobbing.” 

A pause. And then Saskia asked, “What did you do?”

“You mean to get over it?”

She nodded, looking up and meeting Cora’s solid, impenetrable brown eyes. Brown eyes that were actually rather kind. 

A grim smile stretched across her lips. “I stopped talking to people and threw myself into work. Figured if I honed my body, distracted myself from dealing with my guilt and shame and fear, it would work itself out on its own.” Cora sighed, let her arms fall as she relaxed. “It didn’t, obviously. I can still sometimes see the bastard’s wide, crazy eyes the second before I closed mine.”

Saskia swallowed back the lump in her throat and folded her hands under her arms, some part of herself still shying from… whatever this reassurance was. “Comforting.”

Cora’s smile vanished, though there was still some softness in her eyes as she said, “It’s not supposed to be. If you want comfort, go to Kosta. He’s more than happy to give it, I think. Or Vetra. There are plenty of people on this ship who would be thrilled to tell you everything’s gonna be fine and you’re strong enough to get through it.”

The pause that came next was sharp, weighted. Saskia held her breath. 

“I don’t know if you are,” she continued, voice soft and gentle even with its implication, “but I also don’t have any idea what we’re in for. No one does. The kett, the angara, even the Remnant, all of it is beyond anything we were prepared to face.” Her voice grew rueful, twisted with sad acceptance. “You’d think for an Initiative founded on the principle of discovery, we’d have left some room for the possibility of failure.”

“I don’t have that choice, Cora,” Saskia murmured, the words coming before she formed them in her mind. 

It was true. She didn’t have a choice. People on the Nexus were counting on her, and with what she’d learned today… The stakes were higher than ever. 

She’d expected to fight another wave of fear at the realization, but there was nothing. Just a steady acceptance. Fear could come later, and would. Right now she was just… calm. 

“No, you don’t,” Cora agreed. “Which is why I find it a little stupid that you’re unwilling to even discuss the possibility that you don’t know how to control your biotics.”

“It’s not—,” Saskia broke off, shivering as a drop of cold water ran down her back. “I _can’t_ control them. That’s the point.”

Cora knew about her disease. She’d been in charge of coordinating the Pathfinder team back in the Milky Way. She probably knew just as much, if not more than, Lexi about each and every one of the initial team’s medical and combat history.

“You and I both know that whatever SAM did to you has changed your body in ways you probably won’t understand for a long time,” Cora murmured, firm, but not accusatory. “Are you telling me that he was able to give your father the ability to use biotics when he had _never_ been able to use them before, but not fix whatever happened to you when you were a kid?”

Saskia blinked. Something pulled at the edge of her mind, that same hazy film that had come over her right after the gun went off. SAM’s voice mixing with her father’s in some weird synesthetic trance. 

She’d forgotten about the shock of seeing him push back a wave of kett on Habitat-7, throw a lance of dark energy over his shoulder like it was nothing—minutes before they were both blown off the vault into the air. Before they had both died. 

“You know,” Cora said with a hint of exasperation, “for someone who’s clearly smarter than pretty much everybody else, you can be a little dense.”

This laugh hurt, as sudden as it was in the silence and constriction of her chest, but it was nice. Saskia shook her head as it died, still reeling from the possibility that she might… that SAM might… 

Did she even want that, after all this time? 

“I’m sorry.”

Saskia turned to see Cora watching her closely, a deep line in her brow. “For what?”

“I know I haven’t exactly been… _gracious_ about what happened. He was your father, but…” She looked down, a shadow moving across her expression that looked deep, and painful. “I’m just sorry, is all.”

“Thank you.” They hovered in another moment of silence, and Saskia murmured, “I’m sorry, too. It should have been you.”

“Maybe,” Cora sighed, “but your dad had his reasons. And I don’t know anything about the Remnant, so maybe things worked out for the best.”

Saskia forced herself to give her a weak smile. “I thought you said you weren’t here to reassure me.”

“And that’s the last time I ever will, probably,” she muttered, moving away toward the door. “I won’t force you, but I think you should consider training for the eventuality that your biotics are more of an issue than you thought they would be.” She paused, giving her a sad, knowing look. “It’s not fair, any of it, but people like us don’t have the luxury of just hoping it goes away. Not when it could hurt somebody. And you owe it to yourself to try, Saskia.”

Saskia held her gaze. It was strange to hear a woman like Cora include her in any _us_. And it didn’t necessarily make her feel better. But it was something. 

“Now get out,” Cora said as she waved the door open, gesturing to the hallway. “I have to pee.”

Saskia tried to wring what moisture she could from her hair before leaving, not wanting to track water down the hallway. It had to be some kind of safety hazard. 

Again, she felt SAM hovering behind her, as if he was watching, waiting. No matter how much it disturbed her to have something, or some _one_ sitting at the back of her head, it was oddly comforting to think he wasn’t just an unemotional program, sentient only in the loosest definition of the word. 

Once in her room, she pulled on leggings and swapped out her wet shirt for a dry one. She sat in the middle of her bed, knowing she still wouldn’t be able to sleep, and tucked her knees up to her chest, resting her chin on them as she stared out at the flurries of snow past her window. 

“SAM?” she asked, feeling stupid, and nervous, and strangely vulnerable as she sat in her pristine room, a room meant for her father, with an AI that was never supposed to be hers. 

“I am here, Saskia,” he answered, not into her mind, but out loud. 

“Why did you ask Cora to check up on me?”

A pause, and Saskia could almost hear the data whirring as he thought about his response. 

“I suppose it would be most apt to say that I was worried.”

Her brow furrowed. “Because of what happened with my biotics?”

“Yes. In addition to the emotional trauma you suffered when you killed the kett Cardinal.”

She inhaled, a thread of fondness filtering through her surprise. 

“What Cora said about Alec choosing you to be Pathfinder is not wrong. He did have his reasons.”

All the hair on the back of her neck stood on end, and she felt as if she stood at the edge of a long, windy cliff, staring down into a blank abyss. 

“Do you know what those reasons are?” she murmured, as if speaking any louder would break the tenuous wire on which she balanced. 

Another moment of hesitation. 

“SAM, are you… is there something you haven’t told me?”

“There are things that Alec—hid from me. Things he wanted you to learn on your own. But it was always his intention to pass the duties of Pathfinder on to you.”

And then she was tipping over that precipice into the great white nothing of her mind, falling through air and memory and the sheer impossibility of his words.

“Is there anything you _can_ tell me?” she heard herself ask through the whistling, the vertigo that rose around her. 

And so he did. They spent the rest of that night talking, interspersed with long periods of silence where Saskia tried to reconcile herself to the fact that this had always been her father’s intention. 

That for some reason she still didn’t entirely understand, he had chosen _her_ to take over his mission in the eventuality that he died. 

And when, after only an hour of sleep she’d managed to steal from her troubled mind, she rose, donned her clothes, and made for the bio-lab, she knew somehow, even without asking SAM, that Cora was awake and waiting. 

And that she was ready. 


	13. Follow the Shine

Jaal gazed out the back window of the Resistance headquarters in Aya’s capital. He listened absently to Evfra and the Moshae speaking behind him, tracing the dips and jagged valleys, the breaks in the dense tree canopy where rivers snaked across the ground and cut a pattern into its brilliant azure-green carpet. A study in contrasts—half glittering jungle, teeming with life abundant, a defiant jubilance against the chaos that surrounded them across Heleus, while the other half was molten rock and bristled with fire and fury. A hidden gem of ferocious, chaotic life, protected by death itself. 

Havarl might be his tether to everything that made him angara, but Aya held his heart. 

And with the Initiative due to arrive any day to establish a permanent embassy of its own, perhaps it held his future as well. 

“Are you paying attention, Jaal, or daydreaming—as usual?”

He didn’t look back to see Evfra’s stern disapproval, but shrugged, content to watch a flock of red teffrits burst up and over a distant waterfall, their glittering plumed heads and wings catching the late afternoon sun. “Can I not do both?”

“One can,” the Moshae answered with affection, “but unless you have developed the ability in my long absence, _you_ cannot.”

Relief and happiness surged inside him again at her voice, here, beside him, yet tampered by the long-developed fear of reprisal he would find in her eyes after too many months of tutelage under her imperious gaze. 

His fear was not as sharp as it used to be, however. Something he was still having trouble understanding. 

“My apologies.” He turned regretfully away from the orange light dancing over the horizon. “Did you have something else to say about our new allies?”

“The _aliens_ seem willing to cooperate, but I’m not sure how long that will last.” Evfra frowned, or merely stared. It was hard to tell some days if he was perpetually upset, or if he was putting it on for the good of his men. 

“Our _allies_ are responsible for my safe return, Evfra,” the Moshae said, firmly. “Whatever their end goal, they desire peace and cooperation.”

“Their _end goal_ is to find themselves a new home. To build anew, and live.” Jaal couldn’t help the frustration that bled into his voice. He understood Evfra’s caution. The angara had chosen to trust once before, and it had nearly destroyed them. Hadn’t he been just as wary to feel sympathy for them, in those first few days? 

But with everything that had come since, everything he had seen in the kett nightmare facility… and after, those misgivings were as foreign to him now as his new friends had once been. 

“The Pathfinder and her people have pledged to work with the angara against the kett. They offer resources and camaraderie. A united front. We _need_ them, Evfra,” he urged, staring into his old friend and mentor’s face, hoping he might allow his hardened heart to heal, even after so much pain. “As much as they need us.”

“I know you trust them, Jaal,” Evfra muttered, conflict writ plain in his expression, “and I trust you. I am not making an argument for anything but cooperation with… our new allies.”

“But?” 

“ _But_ I am imploring all of us to be cautious.”

Jaal kept his mouth shut, knowing it was more than he could have expected of Evfra even two months ago. All of them were learning to bend, but it would take some of them longer to remember the joy in the flex.

“Cautious, but optimistic,” the Moshae mused, leaning back against the center table stretched with maps and troop notations with a pained sigh. 

Three days had seen a marked improvement in her, but she was still too thin, too weak. Her hands still shook and her voice was not its former ringing, bell-like call. Not yet. 

_Give her time_ , he urged himself, knowing that months of torture would not disappear so soon, no matter how much he willed it away. 

“The girl is a surprise, to be sure,” she continued casually. “I half-expected her to be lying about her ability to interface with the Remnant technology. But she understands it, clearly. Perhaps more thoroughly than even I.”

Annoyance colored his mind, and he fought against the unease that her tone stirred in him. 

The Moshae had not forgiven Saskia for her choice to keep the kett exaltation facility intact. And she had not been subtle about her displeasure, either. His old teacher had been cordial, of course, but he understood the sharpness in her eyes, the severity of her answers to Saskia’s questions. 

To her credit, Saskia had not reacted at all to the Moshae’s obvious anger. Or she had, and it had simply not registered on her face. 

And he had been watching. Closely. 

Perhaps too closely, for the Moshae turned to him then with interest sparkling in her eyes. “That, or she is remarkably lucky.”

“You would give her no credit?” he asked, unable to stop the small swell of frustration from entering his voice. “She saved your life.”

“Yes, she did.” The Moshae sighed, and tilted her head. “But she strikes me as a brittle thing. Too ready to snap. She seems wholly unprepared for the task her people have given her.” 

Jaal looked away before he could voice the anger that her disregard stirred in him. The Moshae was a formidable, intelligent woman, and he admired her greatly. 

But her willingness to see fault in others had never been more apparent to him than it was now. 

“I might be wrong,” she allowed after a moment’s pause. 

“You are,” he muttered, voice hard. “Respectfully.”

She hummed noncommittally, and straightened. “I will retire. If you have any more need of me, Evfra, I ask that you wait until tomorrow. I cannot describe how much I am looking forward to a full night’s rest in my own bed.”

She brushed off both their attempts to help her, claiming that if she needed assistance getting to her apartment above the museum just outside headquarters, she would commandeer the aid of one of the Resistance fighters milling about in the atrium beyond. 

They watched her go in silence, both of them clinging hard to the reality that she was here, present, _alive_ , after so many months of timid hope. 

“You did good work, Jaal,” Evfra said slowly, begrudgingly. 

Jaal grinned, but when he turned back to his commander, he paused. 

Pride shone in Evfra’s face, unmarred by frustration or fatigue, and it filled Jaal with such warmth as he couldn’t contain. 

It wasn’t that Evfra was a cold man, though by angaran standards he was less generous with his praise than most. He had to be. Pulling together the disparate threads of angaran resistance had been hard, thankless work, only possible because of his drive and force of will. A will that had been sharpened and honed, and left little room for friendliness. 

He had only ever known Evfra as his leader and commander, but he guessed that something had been beaten back to make room for his iron focus. Something precious. 

Spending time with the Milky Way pilgrims, coming to understand that emotion was more complex than he had begun to realize before, Evfra’s pride and approval was a delicate, sacred thing. 

“I was not alone,” he murmured, voice caught on all the unvoiced gratitude swelling in his heart. 

“No, you were not. But you’ve proven yourself a competent fighter, and a valued asset to the Resistance.” The sliver of feeling hardened, and Evfra’s voice turned gruff once more. “Something I will take under consideration as we discuss your new assignment.”

The warmth that had suffused Jaal’s chest fractured, and guilt broke through. 

“Evfra,” he began, nervous, “I think there is still more work I can do with the Pathfinder’s team. Ryder has expressed interest in seeking out the Archon, of discovering _why_ the monsters are so obsessed with the Remnant.” He paused, seeing the realization dawn in Evfra’s eyes and willing him to understand. “I would stay with her.”

“You would, would you?” he asked, eyes sharpening at something he found in Jaal’s expression. 

Jaal waited, trying to untangle the conflicting swell of emotion that rose in his chest. He missed his people, yes, and he always would, as he missed Aya with a longing that carried pain in its wake. The Resistance was his home in many ways, a place he had chosen to prove himself, where his family and friends fought side by side to protect their very existence from being twisted and corrupted, and erased.

But he could not let outsiders, no matter how much he trusted and admired them, bear the burden of this fight alone. His place was at the front. 

_With Saskia_. 

The thought came to him from a far distance, a light winking in the clouded heavens of his mind. It took him by surprise, but rang true. Truer than he would have thought possible. 

Evfra finally sighed, the heavy, weary sigh that carried everything Jaal had come to love about the old man, and shook his head in defeat. “It is your choice, of course. I won’t deny that having you there will make coordinating between this Nexus and Aya easier. And I would feel safer having someone I trust on the Pathfinder’s team.” He paused, pursed his lips. “But I will miss you, tavetaan.”

Jaal relaxed, the tension he’d been holding inside him since realizing his desire to stay with the Tempest unspooling and softening his nerves. “And I you, Evfra.”

They moved forward to brace arms against one another, and Jaal fought the urge to pull him into a hug. He’d long ago learned that if Evfra wanted a hug, he would be the one to initiate it. 

“You leave tomorrow with their ship, then?”

Jaal nodded, already the bittersweet acceptance that he would only have the one night to savor what he could of Aya coloring his excitement. “Ryder wants to return to the Nexus to confer with her people about this Meridian. She believes it might be the key to tipping the scales, to healing our worlds.”

Evfra was silent for a moment, studying Jaal with the same interest that had been present in the Moshae’s eyes. “You admire her.”

“I do,” he answered without hesitation. “She is a remarkable woman.”

Evfra frowned. “She’s changed, I’ll grant you that. Less unnerving than she was last time we met. More sure of herself.”

“She is…” Jaal hesitated, wondering how best to put his feelings about Saskia Ryder into words, “complicated.”

Evfra snorted, a flash of dark humor crossing his expression. “Oh, I see.”

“What?”

“Go on.” He turned back to his maps and calculations, his endless lists of supplies and fighters, surveying the entire Resistance laid out before him in a complex web. “I’ll see you tomorrow before you leave, you predictable idiot.”

Jaal fought the urge to ask, again, what he had found so amusing, but put it out of his mind. If Evfra didn’t offer his thoughts freely, Jaal would not pry them out through coercion. 

He navigated the Resistance base slowly, gripping hands with his friends, trying not to let his sadness and joy at being amongst them again, only to leave by his own volition, overwhelm him. It was what he wanted, he knew that, but it was still difficult to say goodbye so soon after returning. 

The capital city was humming in the late afternoon sunlight, everyone collecting themselves from a hard day’s work before re-emerging at night to celebrate with loved ones. The Moshae’s return had stirred the city into a renewed fervor he hadn’t seen in a long time. Lights flashed brighter with the excitement of the angara, even the plants and animals glowed and buzzed with the lingering success in the air. 

For the first time in nearly sixty years, they had _won_. A difficult victory, tinged with the reality of what they faced, but it was a victory nonetheless. He could feel it in the air, in his step, singing in his lungs. They were not simply beating back the tide of oblivion. They were gaining ground. 

All thanks to the woman leaning on a balcony outside the Resistance headquarters, apparently oblivious to the effect she wove on the city around her. 

Jaal was surprised to find her there, in full view of any who might walk past and ogle not only an alien, but _the_ alien, who had been escorted through their streets so recently at gunpoint. Who had brought back their Moshae, and offered them a chance at renewal. He had expected to find her enshrined in the museum, or tucked away in some quiet corner where prying eyes would not pull at her slight frame. 

Even as he walked forward, drawing his own lingering gazes, he saw people stop and stare. A group of Resistance fighters was huddled near a low wall, speaking in hushed voices and shooting her furtive glances. 

Discomfort flashed in his mind, wondering what exactly their fascination was. She wasn’t _that_ strange, not enough to warrant concern. 

He slowed to watch one figure peel away from the group, only to stop altogether when he recognized the young man. _Moraan?_

The young recruit walked up to Saskia in jerking, nervous movements, like a skittish creature approaching something that might lash out if disturbed. 

Jaal couldn’t hear what Moraan said, but as Saskia turned, expression hard and blank, he had to force himself not to laugh. 

He might tenuously assume that the mask she wore now was one of confusion, but one unaccustomed to her neutral severity might mistake it for annoyance, or even anger. And Moraan, it seemed, was utterly incapable of deciding which. His hands clenched and unclenched, rubbing self-consciously against his neck. He seemed to be fighting an urge to pace back and forth, shifting frenetically on his feet. 

Jaal didn’t let the boy suffer too long, walking up purposefully even as he felt the eyes of all lingering in the square flick toward him. _Nosy busybodies_ , he thought with a wide grin. 

Saskia’s eyes also honed on him, and something giddy released inside his chest when he saw them soften and hold. 

“Pathfinder,” he called robustly when he was only a few feet from Moraan, making the boy jump and jerk around, “I hope Moraan has not been bothering you too much.”

“Jaal—I wasn’t,” Moraan looked away quickly, embarrassment flashing in his eyes. “I was only thanking the hu—ah, Pathfinder, for saving the Moshae.”

“Oh. _Moraan_ ,” she said, turning back to the boy with recognition that flashed brightly. “I thought you looked familiar. You were the one having trouble with bullies, right?”

Jaal coughed to hide his laughter as the boy deflated visibly. It wasn’t fair, really, but he found it infinitely amusing that he had thought to woo Saskia. 

Dimly, the thought of _how_ one might woo Saskia caught in his mind, spinning a confusing web of ideas and considerations he’d never had cause to consider before. It made him feel oddly vulnerable. 

He clapped Moraan on his shoulder, ignoring for the moment the strangeness that had come over him, the fluttering nerves that awoke inside him as he met Saskia’s eyes again. “I was trying to catch the Pathfinder alone, Moraan. Would you mind giving us a moment?”

The boy muttered something unintelligible, and slunk back. Jaal could almost hear the collective breath his friends had taken behind him, waiting to break free in a fit of laughter as soon as he returned. 

“I hope he wasn’t bothering you,” Jaal murmured, dropping his voice so none of the watching crowd could hear. 

A line appeared in Saskia’s brow. “No, of course not. I was—” Something flashed behind her eyes, and she looked down, back to the horizon that stretched beyond the balcony. 

Jaal let her gather her thoughts, watching her face tense with… concern, hesitation, discomfort? He might recognize some of her expressions, or was confident enough to guess, but she was still a mystery to him most of the time. 

They hadn’t seen much of each other since the night they returned to the Tempest. 

Jaal had spent nearly every moment in the Moshae’s company, contacting Evfra, other Resistance leaders, and his family, hovering close in case her fragile health had broken and he was not there, unable to bear the thought of losing her in his absence. 

Saskia had kept her distance, presumably not to encroach on the Moshae, and to recover herself. She had been broken inside that facility as well, in ways he was only starting to understand. He had caught her once, after a meeting with the entire crew to debrief and confer about their plans going forward. Their conversation had been stilted and awkward, Jaal at a loss for what he could say to her that would not be just an endless cycle of gratitude. 

But he had wanted to explain his growing desire to remain, that certainty that had begun to grow in those hours she sat beside him and held his hand.

As he stared at her now—tracing the soft line of her cheek, pale, but brushed coral with the setting sun, a few wisps of silver hair escaped from their hold at the back of her head and brushing over the nape of her neck, the small curve of her ear—he realized that though he might have told Evfra his place was with her and her crew, she might not want him to stay. 

Struck cold by the thought, wrapped up in the idea that all his newfound certainty might be built on a foundation of kindling, he almost missed her quiet words. 

“I was waiting for you.”

His mind slowed to the space between his heartbeats. “You were?”

The corner of her mouth tightened. Her fingers twitched and interlocked where she held them against the rail. Still she stared out at the jagged forest beyond the capital, eyes tight with an emotion he couldn’t understand. 

“We’re leaving tomorrow,” she murmured. “I wanted—” Her jaw worked, and he followed the dip in her throat. 

He might not recognize why, but humans telegraphed everything loudly through their thin skin. Every flutter of muscle and tensing of bone was like a hidden sign, a shout in a foreign language he desperately wanted to understand. 

“I guess I wanted to make sure I said goodbye to you.”

He thought he was ready, but the swift constriction in his chest, the disappointment that flooded his mind—was painful. A low hum that sounded more like a grunt escaped through his nose, and he shifted, as if he might be able to spare himself from the brunt of it. 

But there was something… hesitant in the way her fingers moved, the slight tilt of her head toward him. Something imploring. 

He moved closer, leaning against the balcony at her side. “Goodbye,” he repeated, voice catching on that last thread of hope. 

“Unless,” the word burst from her lips, a startled, urgent thing, that she reined in at once. She took a deep breath, another frown furrowing her brow. 

He watched her with wide, attentive eyes. “Unless,” he prompted, that fluttering hope growing wings. 

In the time it took her to respond, he felt weightless, suspended in the air between whatever decision, or offer, she might give him. 

Her shoulders tensed, and she turned, eyes filled with a hesitant, flickering silver flame, lips pursed in what he thought was fear, and determination. “Unless you’d like to stay. With—the Tempest. You’re a part of the team now, and I know I wouldn’t be the only one sad to see you go, so soon. Liam might actually cry.”

_Stars_ , but he was relieved. He laughed, giddiness threatening to overwhelm him. “I would hate to cause him such pain.” 

Had she been nervous to ask him to stay? Had she thought he would not want to leave with her, and her team? The crucible of the kett facility had formed something between them, something tenuous and new, yes, but _firm_. He would not abandon that so easily. And neither, it seemed, would she. 

Slowly, Saskia relaxed, pulled her fingers from the railing, and fiddled with the zip-up she wore over her Initiative soft-suit. 

“He likes you a lot.” Her voice was still small, hesitant, but in it hummed something warm and soft, that made him lean closer to listen. 

“I am fond of him as well,” he murmured, matching her tone as he smiled down at her. 

“You really want to come with us?” she asked, confusion marring the brightness of her eyes. “I’d understand if you wanted to stay. This place…” She trailed off, looking around him with wonder and, if he were reading her correctly, longing. “I don’t know if _I_ want to leave.”

For a moment he was struck by the color in her eyes, their quicksilver catching the reflection of his city, and casting its light back on him, refracted. He saw what she must, a teeming, foreign metropolis of color and life. A city. Something she and her people had left behind, and might not see again for a long, long time. 

“It is not so lovely. Aya is teeming with politicians and bureaucrats,” he said, still smiling. “One can hardly turn without running into someone who wants to use you for something.”

Saskia cocked her head, a knowing glint in her eyes. “You like it here.”

“Do I?” he asked with an arched brow.

She nodded, lips tugging into a sideways smile. “You’re relaxed. Your eyes are brighter. You look like you can breathe a little easier here.”

He chuckled and shook his head, the knowledge that she could read him so well leaving a pleasant warmth in his chest. There was a familiarity in her gaze that made him feel at home. Made him feel _seen_. “Thank you for noticing.”

“Jaal,” she started, voice dropping in concern. “You—” 

“My decision was made four days ago, Saskia.” He met her gaze, held it firm. “If you’ll have me, I would stay with you.”

Her eyes were wide and soft, and he watched the blush move across her cheeks. “Well, all right,” she said, turning back to the green expanse beyond the city, lips pursed against a smile. 

“I’m sorry to have kept you waiting,” he murmured, unable to take his gaze from her face. Her blush was a beautiful thing, not unlike the sky at dusk. “I would have told you sooner to save you the trouble of becoming an attraction for my people to gawk at.”

Her expression hardened, but she shrugged. “I’m used to it. Though, we should probably warn Paaran Shie about her citizens scanning any other aliens they find standing around. Most people won’t be as understanding as I was.”

“Did someone try to scan you?”

She nodded, a wry smile pulling at her lips. “She wanted to know if angara and humans were genetically compatible.”

Jaal blinked, and then grinned. “Two days and already we see our peoples coming together.”

A breathy laugh burst from her lips as more color rose up her neck. She coughed, eyes darting to his in surprise. 

“What did I say?” he asked, frowning as she coughed and looked away.

She let out another reluctant laugh, scuffing her shoes against the ground and refusing to look up at him. It was odd to see her so energetic, so relaxed. Even if he was growing concerned with her reaction to what was clearly some mistranslation of his words, he thrilled to see her composure break. 

“I’m going to let Liam take that one,” she muttered, glancing at him and tucking her hair behind her ear in distraction. A deep breath, and she shook her head, smile still pulling at her lips. 

They stood in silence for a time. He thought once about reaching over to take her hand, but dismissed the idea. Standing so close together, he could imagine her bioelectricity toying with his, were she angaran. Or, rather, if _she_ were angaran he would likely feel nothing at all, holding her electromagnetic signature close to herself so as not to accidentally brush another’s. But perhaps, sometimes, she would let it relax, as she did with her eyes, and her lips, those flashes of clarity that made her resonate at a higher level of existence. 

He looked down at her, once again studying her face. The bruising on her cheek was still visible even with Lexi’s insisted treatment, a mottled purplish yellow that darkened at the edges with her continued blush. Her bottom lip was slightly swollen, but it seemed to be healing. 

_Strange, fragile things_ , he thought, following the pleasant bow of her lips. 

“Was it something about the sexual union between our people that you find amusing?” he asked, if only to make her laugh again. 

She seemed ready for him, however, because the only sound she made was a strangled, violent hum. Her hand came up to her mouth and she leaned forward, as if fighting the urge to smile. More silver hair fell across her face, catching and holding the rosy hue of sunset.

“No, no,” she managed, nostrils flaring as she pinned him with a pointed glance. “Nothing about that is… funny.”

Whatever she meant by the look, it was gone before he could understand. 

She pushed off the balcony and took a short breath, as if settling herself. “I’m sure you want to say goodbye to your friends,” she said, nodding toward the Resistance base behind him, where he assumed his fellow fighters were still mingling about, hoping to learn what it was they spoke of. “And I should probably find Liam for dinner. He’s determined to try out the local cuisine. Should go well.”

Jaal chuckled. “Undoubtedly. I expect him to be chased out of no less than three restaurants before he gives up.”

Saskia hummed in agreement, but made no move to leave. Instead, she reached out, haltingly, with a tight expression, and brushed her hand against his forearm. Gripping once, gently, she said, “I’m really glad you’re coming with us.”

He smiled, affection for this unknowably rare woman swelling in his chest. “As am I.”

And he was, without hesitation. Aya held his heart, but his dreams seemed tied to the fate of the Tempest, and its leader. 

Jaal watched Saskia navigate through the curious crowds until she passed beyond his sight. Most people stopped to watch as she moved past, whispering to their friends, their eyes growing wide with curiosity, and hope. In that moment, he understood the urge, and had to force himself to turn away from the invisible line she wove through his city. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you to all the lovely people who comment, and who read, to all of you, as usual. You guys make my heart sing <3


	14. Starting to Show

Before coming to Andromeda, Saskia and Lukas had undergone physical training for whatever dangers they might face in a strange and possibly-hostile galaxy. 

Some moderate exercise, gun safety, and field protocol—all pretty standard to Saskia after a few years working on Eden Prime and out at the edge of the Terminus systems studying Prothean ruins. 

As part of the Initiative science team, and because of her condition, she’d skipped the more intense training at Harry’s request. He didn’t want to stretch her capabilities too much before sending her into cryo. No one really knew what the effects of such an extended sleep would be, so they were all being cautious. 

Plus, Lukas was already an Alliance-trained soldier, and their team was full of capable fighters. She was the generalized paleoanthropologist and all-around peacekeeping specialist, with a bit of a flair for on-the-job tech support. She wasn’t going to be charging into enemy fire first. 

Lukas had dubbed her the fertilizer, the special sauce they would sprinkle on at the end, once the native flora and fauna had stopped trying to eat them.

In hindsight, she should have realized it wouldn’t be so easy. She should have been more prepared for the physical demands, even if the chaos she’d awoken to meet in Andromeda was more than what anyone could have expected. 

But even with that in mind, she was not prepared for Cora’s training. 

She had known, intellectually, that Cora was a force of nature, that Asari huntresses were famed across the Milky Way for their discipline and efficiency, for their ability to face any and all threats with a cool mind and come out the other side without a scratch. 

Being subjected to it firsthand was a different matter entirely. 

Within an hour of being cleared by Lexi and SAM to begin training with Cora, Saskia’s body felt like it had been run through a meat grinder. Her limbs ached so fiercely she could barely walk without wincing. She could practically feel the bruises forming on her forearms where she clumsily tried to block punches, on her chest when she couldn’t dodge a lance of biotic energy quick enough.

Cora claimed that she was starting small, that any other huntress would have been expected to know most of what she was teaching her before they would even be considered for training, but Saskia secretly wondered if the woman wasn’t taking out the previous months’ frustration at being passed over for Pathfinder on her now. 

She ran drills, over and over again, perfecting each movement before Cora would let her move on. Her limbs burned as she tried to keep up with even the most minimal exercises, and she felt it deep in her bones each time Cora’s mouth pulled into a hard line when she missed a jab or dropped her form. 

The biotics were the least of Saskia’s concerns, to her immense surprise. Now that she was actively engaging with them, she marveled at the change. There was still pain, but that was normal. All human biotics felt some level of discomfort when tapping into their abilities. It wasn’t a natural process for them, and so their prowess would never be as innate as an asari’s, no matter how powerful.

But compared to the shaking weakness and crippling migraines she’d dealt with for the past five years, using her biotics now was as easy as breathing. 

She didn’t know how to feel about it, actually— if she should be relieved to finally let that shadow over her mind pass, or if moving on was an affront to her former self. Guilt, always guilt, at not remaining the frightened girl who had lived most of her life alone, in fear of being overwhelmed by the pain of merely existing, of feeling sad she no longer had the excuse to isolate herself. 

Luckily, she didn’t have much time to think on it, as the majority of her days were spent either with Cora, or the other members of her crew. 

The Tempest was running brilliantly, but she was still a prototype, something of which she was reminded every time Gil and Kallo got into their routine fighting matches about what was, and wasn’t, all right when it came to keeping the Tempest up to date. She barely found any time to work on her own projects these days, after hours training and learning everything they could about this mysterious Meridian, she was lucky to get a few minutes peace to tinker. 

But she found time. Somehow. Usually at the expense of her own sleep. 

Because now that she knew Jaal was joining the Tempest for the foreseeable future, she couldn’t stay away. 

Part of her tried to rationalize the time spent in his tech lab as payment, somehow, for his staying. As if she owed him something for deciding to leave his home and commit himself to helping her hunt down the Archon. 

A larger, quieter part knew that it was really because in the mad dash and dance that her life had become, those precious moments in the tech lab were the only time she ever found peace. It remained her sanctuary. 

It was hard to imagine her life without him now, strange as it was, without his booming laughter, his inquisitive smiles, his warm, comforting presence. The same was true for the rest of her team, but Jaal had been the first one to pull her out of her shell, at least a few inches. 

And maybe this was the real reason why she found time to sit on her little stool at the small space he’d cleared for her in the tech lab while he worked behind her, sometimes talking about his life in the Resistance, his family, or whatever he was working on at the time, or sometimes merely existing in each other’s space in silence. 

Because he had become so important to her, so quickly, without knowing when it had happened, like a silent shift in gravitational pull or an added line of code that had reworked her mind, she couldn’t shake the fear that he too would be taken from her. 

Just like her mom, and dad. 

Just like Lukas, who was supposed to be a constant, another limb, an extra set of lungs, her rock and tether and best, first friend. Who might never wake up. 

Pieces of her life chipped away one by one, lights winking out in the dark hollow of her heart. 

And so she was grateful for Cora’s rigorous training, didn’t bemoan it once as she poured herself into the distraction. She pushed herself as far as SAM would let her, which was surprisingly far, and she didn’t stop to think. 

She didn’t think about the strangeness reforging her body every time she used her biotics, she didn’t think about the dreams, every night, of the Ascendant’s head snapping back with her shot, she didn’t think about Lukas lying alone in a hospital bed without her by his side. And she didn’t think about losing any one of her newfound family. 

She simply _was_ , and worked, and hoped that she had enough time to rebuild her defenses before the next shock and sunder came. 

* * *

Five days after leaving Aya, they boarded the Nexus. It had been nearly a month since their last visit, not since setting up the outpost on Eos, and the change was immediate.

As Saskia and her team disembarked the Tempest and walked into the docking bay markets and embassies, she watched with a small smile as angara mingled with Milky Way pilgrims.

Vetra and Drack were off at once, giving a vague, hand-waving explanation of seeing to ‘business’ while Suvi dragged Kallo into the crowds, the salarian looking physically uncomfortable at leaving his ship.

“Maybe we’ll actually start to get shit done,” Liam muttered under his breath beside her. She could see the gears turning behind his eyes, already thinking of all the things he could do now that the Nexus seemed to have gotten back on her feet. 

He gave her a quick pat on the back, pulling his hand away immediately as she winced. Cora had been particularly punishing that morning.

“Sorry, Ryder.” He winked, and danced off. “Meet you in the Vortex later, yeah?”

Saskia nodded, having reluctantly agreed to Gil’s offer of poker and Liam’s exuberant wish to join them. 

Ever since Voeld and the kett exaltation facility, he’d been more obvious about his attempts to hover. She didn’t mind, was even starting to enjoy his odd sense of humor and lack of subtlety at figuring out where her ‘head was at,’ as he called it. 

“The ‘Vortex?’ ” Jaal asked, watching Liam go with a frown. “Is that a euphemism for something?” 

Saskia grinned. “No, but I can see how you’d think it was.”

“It’s a _bar_ ,” Peebee said from his other side, rolling her eyes as she danced forward. “Honestly, humans and their desire to kill what little time they have by drinking themselves to death. Never understand it.”

“Because no asari has ever gotten drunk before,” Cora snapped as she passed. She turned to Saskia and reined in her annoyance. “I’m heading over to Hyperion.”

“I’ll join soon,” she answered, already itching to check on her brother. “I need to report in to Tann, make sure everything’s all right with the angaran embassy.”

She didn’t think Tann, or anyone else, for that matter, would interfere, but she wasn’t willing to take it for granted. The last thing she needed was to deal with hostile ties to the native population of Andromeda, not when they needed help fighting the kett. And it was _their_ home the Initiative had stumbled into unannounced, after all. 

“I will join you,” Jaal said, looking down at her with a wide smile. “If—that is all right?”

“Of course.” She wondered at the hesitant look in his eyes. “You were the first unofficial angaran ambassador to the Nexus, after all.”

He cocked his head, chuckling. “I suppose I was. I should have handed out pamphlets first.”

“I can give you a tour later, Jaal,” Peebee said, smiling up at him. “After you guys finish up with the boring legal stuff.”

“I would like that. Thank you, Peebee.”

Peebee’s smile widened, and she gave Saskia a wink, calling buoyantly over her shoulder as she skipped off to her apartment. “I’ll comm you. Catch you later, Ryder.”

Saskia watched her go, something hard and petty welling up in the pit of her stomach. She envied Peebee the ability to smile so widely, to move through the world like nothing touched her. Especially where Jaal was concerned. 

_Stop,_ she told herself as she turned to him with a deep inhale. _She can smile at him all she wants. And he can smile at her. It’s fine._

“So, what do you think?” she asked, trying to keep her voice even. 

He stared around the docking bay with wide, attentive eyes, drinking in his surroundings as if they were something to marvel at. She followed his gaze, noticing for the first time how similar the docking bay looked to the Presidium back on the Citadel. She wondered if it had been intentional.

“It is… not what I expected,” he said with a smile. “From what you all told me, I thought it would be little more than a few containers drifting in space.”

They started walking, Saskia trying her best not to focus on the lights that flicked on in people’s eyes when they recognized her. The fact that she even _could_ be recognized was still something she had to get used to. 

“We’re getting there,” she murmured, the stress and tension in everyone’s eyes still present, even after the success of Eos. “At least the lights are still on.”

An entire year of not knowing whether they’d crossed darkspace just to starve to death in a strange galaxy had taken its toll on everyone, as well as the station itself. Most of the rooms and wings they passed were dark and empty, their purpose yet to be fulfilled. And of the mingling crowds, almost all of them were human. Without the other three arcs, no one would rest easy for a while. 

“It is remarkable what you’ve managed to accomplish in a few months,” he said, voice softening. 

She looked up at him as her mouth pulled into a smile. “I didn’t do much.”

“I disagree entirely.”

Her chest fluttered with heat, and she looked away, grateful for the sudden approach of people from the cultural center overlooking the docking bay. 

She would need to get used to his open praise, if he was going to be hanging around. But it was like every time he spoke now, she remembered his voice ringing with emotion as he thanked her, again, for saving his people from the exaltation facility. 

That moment outside her room surfaced at the front of her mind. She’d been so close to breaking, being pulled into a hug that felt more real than anything she’d ever felt in her entire life. He _felt_ so strongly, he gave off a kind of echo, a feedback loop of emotion that thrummed in her chest and mind like a lodestone. 

It made her feel very, _very_ aware of her hands as she slipped them into her pockets and met with the angaran diplomats and Tann, trying to smooth tensions over their spat with Nexus security. It took them the better part of an hour, but she and Jaal were finally able to extricate themselves from the cultural center. 

Saskia tried to release some of the tension building up in her chest from the constant scrutiny of curious, probing eyes as they walked back into the open courtyard. 

“You don’t like the attention,” Jaal murmured as soon as they were alone again.

She frowned and looked up at him, having spent the better part of an hour trying not to stare at him so she could focus on not letting the situation spiral into a diplomatic conflict. “I—don’t. No.”

He nodded and looked away, apparently pleased with his observation. 

Was that not obvious? 

Before she could respond, wondering what on earth she was supposed to respond, he continued, “Yet you placed yourself in the middle of that conflict, ensuring personally that relations between our peoples remained cordial.”

She slowed to a halt, brow furrowing at the smile tugging at his lips. “I was the one who asked for your people’s help. I should at least make sure they aren’t taken advantage of.”

Jaal was silent for a long time, his smile turning soft and his eyes dancing with some unknown, vital light. “You are more capable than you give yourself credit for, Saskia Ryder. I hope I am present for the moment you finally realize your power. It will be magnificent to behold.”

The Nexus faded and blurred around the singular point that was his face, heat rising along her neck and chest, making her feel dizzy. 

Arguments and oppositions rose and broke over her tongue, buzzing in the back of her mind like inconsequential motes of insecurity that winked out in the face of his sheer, overwhelming _trust_ in her. 

After everything that she’d been through, fighting to keep sane, to put one foot in front of another and not stop to think about the fear that her foundation of ephemeral luck would crumble, hearing his unabashed faith in her made all her silly points to the contrary shrivel and die before she could voice them. 

A soft ping brought her back to herself, and she blinked rapidly as Jaal raised the communications display on his forearm. He kept watching her, but some of the light had dimmed from his eyes. Enough so that she could begin to swallow the lump of emotion that had risen to her throat. 

“Peebee appears to have grown tired of waiting for me,” he said pleasantly, voice normal. As if he hadn’t just laid her open with the resonance of his words. 

“You shouldn’t keep her waiting,” she managed, voice tinny and forced. It was a wonder she could speak at all.

“I will see if I can’t convince her to join you all tonight.” He laughed, the sound making her thoughts fizz like it was shorting out the electrochemical connections of her mind. “I admit, I am curious to see Gil in action. He has talked his skills up quite a bit.” He leaned in with a conspiratorial smile. “I hope you crush him.”

She just hummed, gave him a small, awkward smile, and watched him walk toward the apartments over the docking bay. 

Her feet would not move for what felt like hours, until a sharp peel of laughter from the cultural center reminded her where she was. She glided to the tram station, her mind a great, humming tangle of confusion and feeling. The second she was alone and the doors closed on her, she slumped into a seat and groaned. 

She was trying so, _so_ hard not to let her feelings for Jaal grow into something more than friendship and he seemed determined to make it as hard on her as possible. What was worse, he probably wasn’t acting any differently than he would with someone else. She was just a friend, someone he trusted, sure, and that he cared about, but…

“Was something that Jaal said distressing, Saskia?” SAM asked. 

His voice didn’t make her jump anymore, but she wasn’t exactly thrilled about him picking up on every time she went crazy after Jaal said something innocent to her. 

“No. Yes.” She folded over her knees, mumbling into her palms, “Both.”

“I do not understand.”

“Neither do I, SAM.”

“His words sounded entirely complimentary.” A pause. “Are you romantically attracted to him?”

She snorted, wincing as her stomach throbbed with the aftermath of that morning’s exercise. “ _SAM_.”

“It would explain the increased adrenaline in your system when you are near each other, and the heightened levels of dopamine. I have noticed a pattern in your reaction to him, more obvious than anyone else.”

A slow, begrudging smile crossed her mouth as she sat up and rubbed her face. “Well, I suppose that would make sense.” Leave it to the AI in her mind to lay things out so clearly.

Neither of them spoke for a while, letting the steady hum of the tram fill the silence. 

“Does this topic make you uncomfortable?” he finally asked.

“Yes.”

“Why?”

She took a slow, deep breath, wondering at the absurdity of the conversation she was having. Maybe she was just dead tired and hovering on the brink of insanity, but it didn’t feel all that strange to be talking with the AI in her head about her… _crush_. 

“I don’t know. I’ve always had a hard time figuring out what I’m feeling. And… I’ve never really had to deal with these kinds of feelings before.” She grimaced. “Honestly? I am trying not to think about them.”

“Why?”

“Because it’s uncomfortable.”

“Your feelings for him, or the topic in general?”

She let out a small laugh. “The topic in general.”

“I see.”

“Is there a reason you’re interested, SAM? Beyond just making sure I’m not about to explode, obviously.”

Even though she knew she was imagining it, she thought she heard a thread of uncertainty in his voice when he said, “I have seen glimpses of Alec’s memories on the topic, but I have never experienced them myself. It is… confusing.”

Saskia’s chest constricted, and she stared at the other side of the tram, the tunnel flashing past her with a dim glow. “You’ve seen my dad’s memories?”

“Only those he unlocked for me.”

“What—,” she started, her voice tightening as the idea rose in her mind. “Were they of my mom?”

“Some of them. I can download them to Alec’s terminal in the Pathfinder rooms on Hyperion, if you would like to watch them.”

The reality of what they were discussing fell into the pit of her stomach, turning hard and foreign. 

“I… I don’t know, SAM. Maybe.”

It felt like a violation to watch her dad’s memories, to peer into the mind of a man who had always been guarded and secretive, who had never shown more of himself than brief, shuttered glimpses into a life built on focus and discipline. 

“Although—” The thought came and stuck, and she couldn’t stop the smile that spread across her lips. He might not have brought it with him, but… if he _had_ …

“Do you have a record of all the personal items my dad brought from the Milky Way?”

SAM proceeded to list them. There were more things than she’d expected, more than she’d been allowed to bring. But maybe being the first human Pathfinder had had its privileges back in the Milky Way. 

On the last, she almost laughed, and said, “All right, SAM. The next time we have a few minutes to spare, I’ll try to explain what I mean by these… feelings.”

“Can you not explain now?”

“No. I need help. I guess it’s a surprise, but only because you won’t get it if I try to explain now.”

The tram came to a stop, and she was saved any further explanation for the time being. 

Hyperion was a mass of frenetic energy, people rushing about in excitement. With Prodromos up and running, more people were being woken up from their pods. It wasn’t much, but the change was obvious. The atmosphere felt charged, vital, and for the first time since arriving in Andromeda, she felt the hope in the air as a palpable, physical thing. 

Jaal’s praise filtered through her thoughts, and she flushed with hesitant pride, knowing she was at least partially responsible for _this_ , if nothing else. 

She had only taken a few steps into Hyperion, however, when a familiar face broke from the crowd and made his way toward her. 

“Saskia, SAM told me you had arrived,” Harry, her longtime doctor, called with an almost nervous smile as he jogged up to her. 

She frowned. “He did?”

“ _I wanted to wait until we were on Hyperion to tell you, Saskia,_ ” SAM said into her mind. 

Her mind went blank. _No. Please no._

“It’s— Is Lukas—” 

She stumbled over the words, unable to voice the unspoken fear surging through every vein in her body. 

“ _No_ , no,” Harry said, voice dropping as he pulled her off to the side of the hallway. A few people had stopped to shoot her curious looks, some of them sparking with recognition when they saw who she was. “He’s fine. He’s the same.”

She took a breath, weakness breaking over her head like a rush of warm water. 

“It’s about him, though,” Harry continued, lined face going soft in sympathy. “I had a thought. Well, maybe SAM had the thought, but I wanted to run it by you before we tried anything.”

It was all Saskia could do to keep herself standing, relief and fear and fatigue all mingling inside her and making her feel like a soft breeze might tip her over at any moment. 

“Okay,” she said, taking another deep breath. “What is it?”

“I believe,” SAM said, out loud this time, “that I might be able to allow you to speak with your brother.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, after some thought, I've decided not to include the Ryder Family Secrets plot in this story. I had a lot of problems with the end reveal, and I think the quest just doesn't work as a side arc in this fic. I've already got a lot of balls in the air with Saskia's emotional well-being, and I'd rather not distract from the story with that can of worms. So. For the purposes of this story, Ellen Ryder is 100% dead, and while Alec might have initially developed SAM to find her a cure, he eventually decided against the idea. The Benefactor might come into play in any sequel I may or may not one day write, but that would be the only thing to come from that quest. Hope you guys understand <3
> 
> Also! Sorry for the continued hiatus. I think I hit growing pains with this fic after writing so much so fast, and I've had to restructure in my brain a bit to make sure I know where I'm going. It's been hard to focus the past few weeks. Thank you for your patience <3

**Author's Note:**

> Hey guys, so I think at this point I need to mark this fic as most likely never getting completed. I've fallen out of love with this story, and I don't feel invested in any of the characters besides Saskia and her sibling. With Andromeda getting canned and there being no continuation of this, I feel like the amount of work I would need to do to complete the story and make it interesting to me would be better served somewhere else (maybe in something original, where I'm not constrained by characters I'm not in love with and a plot that doesn't hook me). If you want to keep track of what I'm up to, feel free to [follow me on tumblr](https://eveninglottie.tumblr.com/). I do have plans to finish Saskia's story, somehow, I just think it will probably not be in this fic <3


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